1986. Bowers v Hardwick. Upholding US anti-sodomy laws

I don’t know who owns this photo but will happily remove or acknowledge ownership if contacted by the owner.
On 30th June 1986 the United States Supreme Court handed down its judgement in the Bowers v Hardwick case. It found in favour of Georgia Attorney General Michael J. Bowers. In so doing it validated not only Georgia’s anti-sodomy law but the anti-sodomy laws of many other US states that had this antiquated piece of legislation on their statute books.
The Bowers v Hardwick case had its origins in an incident early on the day of August 3rd 1982. Police officer Keith Torick had entered the Georgia home of Michael Hardwick around 8.30 a.m. to serve him with a warrant for a minor offence. (There are conflicting versions of how the officer got into the house; some say the door was ajar when he arrived, others that he was admitted.) In searching for Hardwick he entered his bedroom, where he found him engaging in consensual oral sex with another adult male.
Hardwick was, understandably, angry at Torick’s intrusion and threatened to have him sacked. Torick responded by arresting him and his companion and charging them with breaching Georgia’s anti-sodomy law.
As it turned out, the District Attorney, Lewis Slaton, chose not to proceed with the sodomy charge, partly because the warrant that Torick had gone to present had actually expired days before he had gone to present it.
But Hardwick was not to let the matter drop and, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), filed suit against Atlanta’s police commissioner and Georgia’s Attorney General, Michael J Bowers. The suit argued that Georgia’s anti-sodomy law put Hardwick under constant threat of arrest and violated his constitutional right to privacy.
The first round of the proceedings went against Hardwick, with the district court dismissing the case, citing legal precedent to justify its decision.
But Hardwick was not prepared to accept this and lodged an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. This time he was successful, with the Court declaring that Georgia’s anti-sodomy law violated his rights under the Ninth and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution. It also quoted a different legal precedent supporting Hardwick. The Court also demanded that the case be retried and that the district court apply “strict scrutiny”. In this case strict scrutiny meant that Bowers had to demonstrate that the law served a compelling state interest.
But Bowers chose not to go for a retrial and, instead, applied to the US Supreme Court for a final determination of the case. And, much to the disappointment of queer activists, SCOTUS ruled in Bowers favour – albeit by the slimmest of margins of 5-4.
Justice Byron R. White, one of the five judges ruling in Georgia’s favour, opined that neither the Fifth nor Fourteenth Amendment supported “a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.” Chief Justice Warren Burger declared that recognising a right to engage in homosexual sodomy would “cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”
Another judge to support Bowers was Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. But upon his retirement four years later, Powell opined that his vote ‘had probably been a mistake’! Sadly, that ‘mistake’ had prolonged the harassment of gay men – not just in Georgia but the many other US states that had anti- sodomy laws – until the Supreme Court finally reversed its decision in 2003 in the Lawrence v Texas case.
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