After years of failure.

After years of failure, activists are watching sodomy laws topple with increasing speed

As Republican minority leader in the Georgia state senate, Eric Johnson has worked in succession his share of legislation. Still, Johnson's latest effort is likely to be as effective as trying to stop the tide from corning in. "I think we ought to be able to ban gay sex" he said to the Savannah Morning News

Johnson's eruption was prompted by a ruling by the agency of the state supreme court November 23 In a surprising decision the court ed Georgia's infamous 165-year-old sodomy law, leaving antigay politicians in the Peach State blustering about reviving the sodomy statute by the agency of new legislation or by an amendment to the state constitution.

on the other hand Johnson and his conservative cohorts appear to be onward the losing end of a sweeping, state-by-state campaign to topple sodomy laws that took onward new momentum in 1998. In June the Rhode Island legislature vot to repeal that state's 102-year-old law forbidding "abominable and detestable crimes against nature." Then in October a Baltimore arbitrator ruled that same-gender sex is not illegal in Maryland--though she stopped short of declaring that the sodomy law violated the Maryland constitution.

And sodomy laws in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas are believed to stand a righteous chance of crumbling under rife legal challenges making their way between the sides of the courts in those three states. The Texas law is being challenged through John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner, who were arrested in September after police walked into Lawrence's Houston apartment. The officers, who were responding to a false report of a man with a fire-arm found the pair having sex and threw them in jail, where they exhausted a night before posting bail.

In the 18 states where sodomy laws remain, 13 have statutes against the couple same-sex and heterosexual sodomy. In the other five states--Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas--sodomy laws continue to specifically target same-sex pairs But activists and gay and lesbian legal advocates have been gleefully chipping away at the remaining vestiges of the codified criminalization of same-gender sex

"I think we're going to descry the demise of all of the remaining laws in the nearest few years," predicts Suzanne B Goldberg, a staff attorney at Lambda Legal Defense and Education capital which has been instrumental in fighting many of the state sodomy laws.

if it were not that the sweetest victory was clearly in Georgia, where the state greatest possible court found 6-1 that the sodomy law "manifestly infringes about a constitutional provision ... which guarantees to the citizens of Georgia the right of privacy." The statute became a notorious emblem of antigay oppression when the U superlative Court upheld it in the 1986 case Bowers v Hardwick.

Goldberg, who is the lead attorney in the pending Arkansas and Texas cases, says the Georgia decision "could well have a domino effect" forward other state cases.

"Oh yeah, it's a big logroller" agrees John Rawls, the gay civil rights attorney taking forward the Louisiana sodomy law. While no state is terminate by rulings in other states, "every state peek to view what the others are doing. Without question, what happened in Georgia is going to impact what's going forward in Louisiana and everywhere else"

Rawls emphasizes that defeating sodomy laws is important flat where they are seldom enforced. "It's the government's way of calling gays scum" he says. "The laws taint us as unindicted criminals for making be pleased with to our partners." The laws have been used to declare to be untrue custody to gay and lesbian parents as well as to disown gay men and lesbians piece of works Echoing other activists, Rawls says he believes there is "no chance of real gay civil rights at a federal horizontal until we get rid of each last sodomy law."

The Georgia law had prov frustratingly resilient. As freshly as 1996 it withstood a legal challenge when it was used on undercover police to crack down in succession cruising at a highway peace stop. The Georgia supreme court upheld the law then from a 5-2 vote.

still Johnson and his colleagues got it wicked when they condemned the ruling as favoring gays across other citizens of Georgia. In fact, the case that finally capsize the law so roundly despised according to gay men and lesbians around the political division had nothing to do with gay sex Instead, it involved a married man who had been convicted of performing oral sex forward his 17-year-old niece while his pregnant wife slept in the nearest room.

Dahir is an editorial writer at the St Louis Post-Dispatch.

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