havior and laws that prohibit behavior for homosexuals that is legal for heterosexuals:
Despite great progress, nearly half the states still criminalize gay and lesbian sexual behavior. Many states eliminated their so-called sodomy laws in the sixties and seventies, as part of a modernization of state penal codes, which dropped a host of unnecessary statutes. But only three jurisdictions have decriminalized sodomy in the 1990s: Nevada and the District of Columbia had their sodomy laws repealed by legislation, while Kentucky had its law struck down by a state court (Vaid 13).
Homosexuality is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, though the courts have created a body of law concerning issues related to homosexual rights in society. Recent cases have addressed the issue of homosexual rights in terms of the question of privacy, which is also not mentioned in the Constitution. It has become a constitutional issue as an unenumerated right found in the penumbra of clauses in the Constitution, or hidden in different provisions of the Constitution. For instance, cases under the Fourth Amendment may deal with protections from
intrusions by the police; libel cases under the First Amendment involve claims that someone has published damaging information about another person and so has intruded on that person's
privacy. State and federal statutes address privacy directly by protecting people from all manner of intrusive behavior on the part of others. The abortion debate often revolves around
questions of the right to control one's own body (Mason and Stephenson 442).
The issue of privacy was raised in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut in which Connecticut's anticontraceptive statute, though it did not violate any express guarantees of the Bill of Rights, was found to violate the penumbral right of privacy, a right not expressly stated in the Constitution but found in the shadow, or penumbra, of other rights that a...