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/lp/duke-university-press/what-gay-studies-taught-the-court-the-historians-amicus-brief-in-7AcN0vodQB
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Copyright
- Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press
- ISSN
- 1064-2684
- eISSN
- 1527-9375
- DOI
- 10.1215/10642684-10-3-509
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
George Chauncey Introduction The historians’ amicus brief reprinted here was submitted by a group of ten professors of history to the U.S. Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of Texas’s “homosexual conduct law†in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. The Court cited the brief in the decision it issued on June 26, 2003, which overturned that law and the rest of the nation’s sodomy laws. Although legal observers immediately began to debate the implications of the decision and the merits of its legal reasoning, there is no doubt that it constituted a major victory for the gay movement. Although the two plaintiffs in Texas were not the only ones to face such charges, few consenting adults had been prosecuted for sodomy even before the decision. But by criminalizing homosexual activity, the sodomy laws had effectively criminalized all lesbians and gay men, and opponents of gay rights had regularly used this imputation of criminality in public debates and court decisions to justify everything from the exclusion of gays from the military to the removal of children from the homes of their lesbian mothers. Sodomy laws were an ideological cornerstone in the legal ediï¬ce of antigay discrimination. In
Journal
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies – Duke University Press
Published: Jan 1, 2004