Deb Price: Pro-privacy court ruling keeps giving for gays

Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court did something that's hard for anyone: It admitted it had been wrong.

That remarkable admission -- offered 17 years after the colossal legal error -- came in a case challenging whether Texas could punish those of us who're gay for having consensual sex in the privacy of our own home.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in striking down all remaining state anti-sodomy laws, explained that the rights of liberty and privacy were at stake--and that they extend to gay Americans.

The gay men Texas had wrongly prosecuted "are entitled to respect for their private lives," Kennedy wrote, and "the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime."

Eloquently, Kennedy concluded that the authors of the Constitution's grand but intentionally vague promises "knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom."

Now, looking back at gays' breathtaking legal, political and cultural progress during the past five years, it's clear that a huge amount of the credit belongs to the Lawrence v. Texas decision.

We can see it cited by federal and state judges in rulings respecting gays as parents, soldiers and couples wanting to marry. We can see its influence in state legislatures' leaps forward. And we can feel the respectful tone it set in the most basic human contacts -- the neighborly wave or helping hand.

Most immediately, the decision erased the aura of criminality that surrounded gays even in states without sodomy laws.

Today, more heterosexuals than ever before understand gay people have a right to full, rich private lives and that, as Kennedy gently instructed, to see gay relationships just in terms of sex is demeaning, "just as it would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse.... When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring."

Expanding the reach of this golden ruling is the joyful task ahead for this and future generations of Americans.

Reach Deb Price at (202) 662-8736 or dprice@detnews.com.
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