The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in Lawrence v. State of Texas, a case that could overturn all remaining state "sodomy laws" through the U.S. -- or, perhaps, just overturn same-sex sodomy laws, or in the worse case scenario, wind up upholding these hideous relics. Amicus (or "friend of the court") briefs in support of one side or the other are being filed by numerous organizations; the deadline is January 16.
The liberal Justices on the court (Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens) are all expected to vote to overturn the sodomy statutes. The moderate-conservatives (O"Connor and Kennedy) are the swing votes that could go either way, though Kennedy wrote the Evans v. Romer ruling that barred Colorado and other states from blocking gay rights laws. O"Connor signed onto Romer, but also voted to keep sodomy laws 17 years ago when the court last visited the issue, in Bowers v. Hardwick. The hard conservatives (Scalia and Rehnquist) will vote to uphold the laws. I didn't include Thomas among them because, believe it or not, some court watchers think he might actually be reachable with the right limited-government arguments. It's doubtful, I admit, but possible.
The briefs with the best chance to sway the non-liberals will be filed by groups such as the libertarian Cato Institute (see my earlier posting on a Cato letter in the Wall Street Journal arguing for repeal based on equal liberty/equal protection arguments under the 14th Amendment); by the Log Cabin Republicans and its sister group, the Liberty Education Forum (which will also, in part, be making equal protection arguments); and by the Republican Unity Coalition.
Of real concern, however, are the briefs to be filed by groups such as the National Organization for Women, and perhaps the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, among others. It's quite possible that their arguments will be based not on conservative constitutional principles, but on the greatly disputed "privacy right" behind Roe v. Wade, under which a far more liberal court found abortion rights in the Constitution. Even more problematic, they may reach to include arguments in favor of gay marriage -- certainly a worthy and important cause, but one that should be taken to the court only after sodomy repeal is the law of the land. Arguments of this nature may appeal to the left-liberal base of thes groups. But while not needed to achieve the votes of the liberals, they could well scare off the centrist and conservative swing votes. In any event, we"ll know soon enough.
Who's Being Helped?
Michael Bronski, a writer on the gay left, scores a number of
good points in
this critique of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation, a group I was affiliated with several years ago.
Bronski, writing in Boston's The Phoenix, looks at some of GLAAD's
recent actions and observes:
The bottom line is that GLAAD has more in common than not with right-wing, religion-based groups that have railed against such works as Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi and Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. -- [GLAAD] is claiming that there is only one correct way to represent homosexuality through art. If the former is religious fundamentalism, the latter is sexual-identity fundamentalism. And if enforcing that is what GLAAD sees as its job, it's fair to ask whether the organization has lost its way -- and its relevance.
Although Bronski doesn't say it, GLAAD's recent habit of shaking contributions out of producers, in order to avoid trouble over works that GLAAD may otherwise find insufficiently positive as representations of lesbian and gay (and bisexual and transgender) lives, comes right out of the Jesse Jackson playbook.
Late Addendum: Whoops! Bronski's critique is
actually more than a year old - the fact that the Phoenix puts
today's date on top of its web pages, even for archived material,
threw me a curve. Oh, well, it's still worth noting.