This paper is a discussion of the changing attitudes toward homosexual rights in America, with particular emphasis on sodomy laws, especially those in Texas. Laws designed to legislate sexual behavior have tended to reflect the prevailing social opinions regarding those behaviors. Homosexuality, which has a long history of social disapproval, has slowly been gaining acceptance, but it remains a difficult issue, and this difficulty is reflected in the ways in which government, at the local, state, and federal levels, has tried to regulate it. Texas remains one of the last states to maintain a law against sodomy that is aimed particularly at limiting and punishing homosexual behavior. Such laws illustrate the conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the desire of government to set standards of public behavior.
A recent Time/CNN poll (Lacayo, 1998, October 26) shows that 64 percent of Americans now believe that homosexual behavior is acceptable; twenty years earlier, only 41 percent believed this. Yet the same poll reveals that 48 percent believe that homosexual relationships between consenting adults are morally wrong (p. 36). These statistics show, as Richard Lacayo (1998, October 26) writes, "An irresistible force of cultural change is meeting an immovable object of political resistance" (p. 34). While being a homosexual is becoming increasingly accepted, this acceptance may never be complete, and government reflects this ongoing conflict.
The founders of the United States of America came out of British and Western European cultures that severely punished homosexual behavior. This punishment was initially restricted to men; an 1811 British court case "debated whether a sexual relationship between women was even possible - this at the same time as an increasing number of men were going to the gallows convicted of sodomy" (Adam, 1987, p. 5).
Initial efforts to establish a gay rights movement had to fa...