Lawrence V. Texas - Reactions

Reactions

President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer refused to comment on the decision, noting only that the administration had not filed a brief in the case. As governor Bush had opposed repeal of the Texas sodomy provision, which he called a "symbolic gesture of traditional values." After quoting Fleischer calling it "a state matter", Linda Greenhouse, writing in the New York Times, commented: "In fact, the decision today...took what had been a state-by-state matter and pronounced a binding national constitutional principle."

The Lambda Legal's lead attorney in the case, Ruth Harlow stated in an interview after the ruling that "the court admitted its mistake in 1986, admitted it had been wrong then...and emphasized today that gay Americans, like all Americans, are entitled to full respect and equal claim to constitutional rights." Prof. Laurence Tribe has written that Lawrence "may well be remembered as the Brown v. Board of Education of gay and lesbian America." Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice has referred to the decision as having "changed the status of homosexual acts and changed a previous ruling of the Supreme Court... this was a drastic rewrite."

Peter LaBarbera, a senior policy analyst of the anti-LGBT group Culture and Family Institute, later president of the anti-LGBT organization Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, said that the end result of Lawrence v. Texas was "like the Roe v. Wade of the homosexual issue." The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the decision "deplorable."

Columbia Law Prof. Katherine M. Franke, in an analysis of Lawrence that appeared in June 2004, criticized its "domesticated" conception of liberty that failed to present "a robust concept of freedom." She contrasted it with the language of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which discussed "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Lawrence's emphasis on geographical privacy, in her view, described a circumscribed form of liberty and failed to develop the court's evolving assertion of the right to autonomy and personal independence. Its assumption, based on nothing in the record, that Lawrence and Garner were in a relationship and had a personal bond leaves open the court's view of their right to express their sexuality or fulfill erotic desires. She noted how a Kansas court in Limon v. Kansas read Lawrence to allow far greater punishment for engaging in same-sex activity with a minor than different-sex activity with a minor. She terms this "the legal enforcement of heteronormative preferences." The decision in Limon was later reversed, in part on the basis of Lawrence.