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Lawrence V. Texas: The Justification For The LGBT Community

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Lawrence v. Texas: The Justification for the Decision and its Significance for the LGBTQ+ Community
The history of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States is long and complicated. LGBTQ+ identities that are accepted by people outside that community change with time, as some identities establish themselves as commonplace while others are just being introduced to non-LGBTQ+ people. However, rights and acceptance for the LGBTQ+ community are nearly always tied to legal recognition. Lawrence v. Texas questions whether or not a Texas statute that bans homosexual sodomy is constitutional. Although LGBTQ+ rights issues are controversial, everyone deserves to be equally protected under law regardless of sexual orientation. Likewise, the Fourteenth Amendment’s …show more content…

Evans, and the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that upheld a sodomy statute seventeen years prior Lawrence v. Texas no longer reflects societal views, despite it being the precedent before the Lawrence ruling. In Romer v. Evans, which was decided in 1996, it was ruled that laws cannot single out groups of people unless there is legitimate government interest, which in Romer there was not, as desire to “harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest” (Romer v. Evans) according to Justice Kennedy. The Texas sodomy statute singled out gay people, men in particular, and although there might have been a legitimate government interest during the AIDS crisis, there is no longer, and the statute existed long before that (Why Sodomy Laws Matter). In addition to Romer essentially invalidating the sodomy statute, the ruling that allowed the Texas appellate court to justify Lawrence and Garner’s convictions, Bowers v. Hardwick, is outdated. The Supreme Court said in the ruling of this case that there are, “no constitutional protections for acts of sodomy” (Bowers v. Hardwick) and they focused largely on whether or not there was a constitutional precedent that allowed for the protection of sodomy, when all Michael Hardwick was asking for was repealing of the statute, not legal protection. There is clear homophobic bias in the …show more content…

The ruling in Lawrence v. Texas reflects that, and it is justified by the unconstitutionality of the sodomy statute in question, the fact that Lawrence and Garner’s arrest was unconstitutional, the precedent set by Romer, and the outdated nature of the previous ruling on sodomy statutes in Bowers. Additionally, the mental well-being of the LGBTQ+ community will be improved by this ruling, further justifying it and its necessity. People should not be discriminated against simply because they have sex with people whose gender matches their own, and the Lawrence ruling, in reducing the amount of discrimination that is possible, allows an equal future to be a possible

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