Understanding the Right's Fear of Sex: How America's Absurd Oral Sex and Sodomy Laws Were Overturned

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/sex/154847/understanding_the_right%27s_fear_of_sex%3A_how_america%27s_absurd_oral_sex_and_sodomy_laws_were_overturned/

It might seem utterly absurd that oral sex was once illegal in the U.S.—as it was in every state before 1961. Until a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2003, though, it remained illegal in 13 states, along with anal sex (and in some, sex-toy use). Nine states banned it for everyone, and four restricted their laws to gays and lesbians. Though the laws were rarely enforced, they indelibly defined gay men and lesbians as criminals, and thus were used to justify discrimination. In 1991, Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers cited the state’s sodomy law when rescinding a job offer to a recent law-school graduate after he found out she was a lesbian.

That Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, still reverberates today. For the Christian right, it ranks with Roe v. Wade as the most odious Supreme Court ruling of all time. When right-wingers fume about “activist judges creating ‘rights’ not enumerated in the Constitution,” they usually mean privacy—specifically, sexual privacy.

To more rational souls, the decision’s logic is screamingly obvious. What could be a more unconstitutionally “unreasonable search” than cops battering into your bedroom to bust you for performing commonplace sex acts?

Yet the concept of a constitutional right to privacy has only become part of American jurisprudence in the last century, based on the idea that it is implicit in the "penumbra" of the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court extended privacy rights to sexuality in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which overturned a law prohibiting married couples from buying contraceptives, and to unmarried couples in 1972. Griswold was the precedent for legalizing abortion in 1973.

[damyank913]

1. Man, oh man...

...that was hard to swallow.

[TrogL]

5. You need to work on your technique

Just relax your jaw and .... wait, what?

[DCKit]

2. What's a "penumbra"? Sounds dirty. I wanna try it. nt

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. Non total shadow.

Umbra is shadow in Latin. Pen means "around".
Penumbra is a lighter shadow, as in astronomy when you have complete shadows and partial shadows during eclipses.

Peninsula -- Pen is around, insula is island. So it's almost an island.

Penumbra is a legal term in reference to rights of privacy.

[sarge43]

3. The federal government still enforces an oral/sodomy law, re UCMJ, Article 125. n/t