Perry says Texas sodomy law is 'appropriate'
I can understand a state's responsibility to protect children from sexual predators, but when it gets into legislating consensual sexual behavior amongst adults, a line has been crossed. Regardless of your feelings about homosexual behavior, or any other type of recreational sex, is it really the responsibility of the state to legislate morality? Governor Goodhair seems to thinks so.
AUSTIN -- The Texas law that bans homosexual sex is "appropriate," Gov. Rick Perry said today, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court said it would decide a Texas case that asks if it's unconstitutional for states to punish same-sex couples for having sex.
"I think our law is appropriate that we have on the books," Perry said.
The case the court will review is the prosecution of two Houston men under a 28-year-old Texas law that makes it a crime to engage in same-sex intercourse.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 1986 that consenting adults have no constitutional right to private homosexual sex, upholding laws that ban sodomy.
Sodomy is abnormal sex, and in some states that's defined as anal and oral sex. Nine states ban consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. In addition, Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma punish only homosexual sodomy.
The Texas case involves John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were arrested in 1998 in Lawrence's apartment, jailed overnight and later fined under Texas' Homosexual Conduct Law, which classifies anal or oral sex between two men or two women as deviate sexual intercourse.
Is this really the sort of thing that we should depend on our law enforcement personnel for? How does this increase the safety of the tax-paying public? From where I sit, all this really accomplishes is to satisfy those narrow-minded busybodies who feel it is their place to "protect" us from our own primal urges.
Generally speaking, adults should be allowed to engage in any type of consensual behavior that doesn't result in a call to 911. In an age when we are dealing with terrorism, drugs, and other issues, it seems to me that regulating private consensual behavior would be an exceedingly poor use of already scarce resources.
Of course, there is also the fact that some adults may engage in behaviors that some might find objectionable, dangerous, and/or immoral. Even so, if the behavior is consensual, and if it takes place behind closed doors, do we as a society have the duty, right and/or responsibility to proscribe that behavior? If you do not like or approve of a particular behavior, then don't engage in it. Just because someone else might choose to partake of that behavior does not make it a candidate for legislation.
There are legitimate interests that are and should be the purview of the state: defense, foreign policy, taxation, law enforcement. Patrolling our bedrooms has no place on that list. Those who feel that it is the place of government to legislate and regulate morality should keep in mind that there are already places that do exactly that- Iran and Saudi Arabia. Is that what we are really after?
