Bowers v. Hardwick Majority Opinion The purpose of this rese

In a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court in 1986 decided that mutually consensual homosexual conduct, specifically the act of sodomy, committed in the privacy of a home, could Constitutionally be prohibited by the state of Georgia. The majority position was taken in opposition to a petition on the part of a man charged with sodomy to the effect that "the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." Though the specific charges originally brought by Georgia were dropped, the suit was prosecuted to the Supreme Court on the view that the case raised issues of individual privacy and the limits of state power to enforce statutes designed to regulate consensual sexual behavior. White's majority opinion was based on cases argued on grounds of moral and statutory tradition, a stated reluctance on the part of the federal judiciary to actively interfere with state law duly enacted pursuant to the will of a majority of the people, a reluctance to enlarge the scope and definition of due process as defined in the Fif

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the law to reach heterosexual as well as homosexual activity. The all-encompassing features of the state statute suggest that the state was insinuating itself into the lives of its citizens. On the other hand, the facts of the case (i.e., the failure of Georgia to prosecute the homosexual petitioner or the heterosexual couple initially arrested under the statute) suggest that the state's initial attempt to enforce the statute, followed hard upon by its withdrawal from prosecution, could be taken as evidence of the potentiality for capriciously selective enforcement of the law. Accordingly, Powell's suggestion that the "moribund character today of laws criminalizing . . . private, consensual conduct" does not alter the original Constitutionality of the Georgia statute does not hold up. Instead, the very fact that Georgia had in the recent past enlarged its jurisdiction over private sexual conduct suggests that the state (or perhaps elements within it) was very interested in exercising its ability to incite fear of individual control on one hand and actual individual control on the other. Further, such state-controlled instruments of fear as far as they might be directed at one segment of the population and not another argue the
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Approximate Word count = 2003
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)