In 1986 Sandra Day O'Connor, then still a relatively new Supreme Court Justice, voted with the majority in Bowers v. Hardwick to uphold the constitutionality of a Georgia "sodomy" law that criminalized non-missionary position sex in private between consenting adults. Some 17 years later, a far more experience Justice O'Connor voted with the majority to overrule Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas.
Unlike the Georgia law, the Texas statute applied only to same-sex sex, allowing Justice O'Connor to find it unconstitutional on equal protection grounds (and to maintain the fig leaf that she wasn't directly contradicting her earlier ruling). But for all intents and purposes, she sent to history's dustbin a scurrilous anti-gay legal precedent she had originally helped put in place. Those 17 years had allowed Justice O'Connor, and much of the country, to develop a far deeper understanding of gay people as citizens entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Let's hope other conservative jurists eventually will follow in her footsteps.
Update: A critical view and my response, in
our
mailbag.