How Gay Sex Was Legalized
In 1998, two sheriff's deputies walked into a Texas bedroom and found two men breaking a law against sodomy. The legal battle that followed made same-sex relationships legal in every state -- but not before causing a lot of drama at the Supreme Court.
The day for oral argument in Lawrence v. Texas, March 26, 2003, was a bright spring morning, with temperatures nearing 70 degrees. The Iraq war had begun one week earlier, consuming most of the attention of the media and the public at large. At the Supreme Court, however, all eyes were on a battle of a different sort, a cultural and legal one with historic implications.
The Court has seating for 250 public visitors, but as in every high-profile case many of the seats were reserved ahead of time for guests of the justices, members of the Supreme Court bar, and the press. Probably no more than 100 seats were available on a first-come, first-served basis to the general public, and people had been in the queue for those all night. They spent the night in sleeping bags or sitting on blankets or folding chairs; no one was allowed to leave for more than one hour at a time. The mood was festive, upbeat, anxious, and excited. Someone in line with a guitar serenaded the group with folk songs and civil-rights anthems, as if the 1960s had briefly flowered once again in the 21st century.
Sometime that morning about a dozen antigay protesters led by the 73-year-old Reverend Fred Phelps, the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, arrived, accompanied by some young children. The group held up signs referring to the Bible and its condemnation of Sodom, and bearing slogans like "God Hates Fags" and "AIDS Is God's Revenge." Other signs attacked America itself for its excessive tolerance of homosexuality. A young girl held aloft the message "Thank God for Sept. 11." Another sign said, "God Destroyed the Shuttle," referring to the recent crash of the Columbia space shuttle. The antigay protesters distributed leaflets warning that the United States would lose the war in Iraq, among other calamities, if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the so-called sodomites.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/how-gay-sex-was-legalized/254308/#
= new reply since forum marked as read
