Court Case Number 15: Bowers V. Hardwick (June 30, 1986)

Court Case Number 15:  Bowers v. Hardwick (June 30, 1986)


     In August of 1982, Michael Hardwick was charged with violating the

Georgia statute criminalizing sodomy by committing that act with another adult

male in the bedroom of Hardwick's home.  Hardwick then brought suit in the

Federal District Court, therefore challenging the constitutionality of the

statute as it criminalized sodomy.  Hardwick asserted that he was a practicing

homosexual, that the Georgia statute, as administered by the defendants, placed

him in imminent danger of arrest and that the statute for several reasons

violates the Federal Constitution.

     I oppose the Court of Appeals decision that Michael Hardwick's complaint

was dismissed by evidence seen through rights readily identifiable in the

Constitution's text involved much more that the imposition of the Justices' own

choice of values on the States and the Federal Government, the Court sought to

identify the nature of rights for heightened judicial protection.  Such landmark

court decisions as Palko v. Connecticut  stated this category includes those

fundamental liberties that are “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,”

such that “neither liberty nor justice would exist if any fundamental liberties

were sacrificed.”  In Moore v. East Cleveland, fundamental liberties are

characterized as those liberties that are “deeply rooted in this Nation's

history and tradition.”

     Proscriptions against a fundamental right to homosexuals to engage in

acts of consensual sodomy have ancient roots.  Sodomy was a criminal offense at

common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original thirteen States when

they ratified the Bill of Rights.  In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was

ratified, all but five of the thirty-seven 
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