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For an issue as politically divisive as a prohibition on homosexual sex, reaction to Thursday's Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texasdecision against antisodomy laws is surprisingly uniform: almost everyone agrees it's a broad, far-reaching ruling with consequences for years to come.

"Lawrence v. Texas could have implications far beyond the closed doors of private homes," The Washington Post noted in a news story Friday. "In an unexpectedly large step, the court said traditional morality is no justification for making legal distinctions among sexual behaviors of consenting adults."

Similarly, the Posteditorialized, "The importance of [the] 6 to 3 decision is not simply that the court struck down an oppressive law. … It tells legislatures that a majority's opinion about what is or is not moral cannot justify the state's intrusion into the most intimate details of people's lives."

The main disagreement is whether this momentous decision was wise. And evangelicals, who are not always in agreement on public policy toward homosexuality, seem to be uniform in saying the court went too far.

To be sure, Thursday's decision would have elicited reaction from some religious conservatives regardless of the outcome. The Family Research Council, for example, issued a press release Wednesday saying it was "ready to respond" regardless of the outcome, and that the case had implications for the nation's understanding of marriage. And indeed, when the decision came, FRC president Ken Connor called it "a direct attack on the sanctity of marriage." But he didn't stop there. "Nothing less than the people's right to self-government is at stake," he said.

"We all were especially surprised by the scope and breadth of [Thursday's] opinion," Jay Sekulow, legal director of the American Center for Law and Justice, told The New York Times. "It was a grand-slam homer for the other side."

The court considered a number of issues in throwing out the Texas antisodomy statute and its 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision approving a similar law in Georgia. But of prime concern for evangelicals now is the majority's opinion that morality cannot define the law.

"The fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, quoting Justice John Paul Stevens's 1986 dissent in the Georgia case.

The majority opinion authored by Kennedy said homosexuals have a right to privacy guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and laws regulating their consensual sexual practices violate that right. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a concurring opinion to distinguish her view from that of the majority. For her, the issue was not privacy, but equality. The Texas law, she wrote, was unconstitutional because it made sodomy illegal only for homosexuals—heterosexuals could still engage in such activity. (She therefore did not want to overrule Bowers v. Hardwick.) However, O'Connor affirmed that behavior cannot be made criminal simply because of moral concerns.

"This case raises a different issue than Bowers: whether, under the Equal Protection Clause, moral disapproval is a legitimate state interest to justify by itself a statute that bans homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy. It is not," she wrote. "A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the State's moral disapproval of that class and the conduct associated with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution."

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47