Amicus
Briefs—Lawrence and Garner v. Texas
Soulforce,
February 18, 2003
Soulforce, Inc is proud to announce that we have signed
on to the Friend of the Court (Amicus) Brief in the case of Lawrence and
Garner v. Texas.
John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in
Lawrence’s Houston home and jailed overnight after officers responding to a
false police report found the men engaged in private, consensual sex. Once
convicted, they were forced to pay fines and are now considered sex offenders
in several states.
Lambda Legal is representing Lawrence and Garner in the
Supreme Court of the United States, where the Justices will hear arguments on
whether Texas’s “Homosexual Conduct” law is constitutional.
This is a significant step forward because it means the
court has seen the serious constitutional problems with laws that criminalize
sex by consenting gay couples and is willing to look at them closely.
Texas’s law and others like it are widely used to
justify discrimination against gay people in everyday life; they’re invoked
in denying employment to gay people, in refusing custody or visitation for gay
parents, and even in intimidating gay people out of exercising their First
Amendment rights.
See http://www.lambdalegal.org/cgi-bin/iowa/splash.html
for more information.
Soulforce is part of the “civil rights
organizations” amicus brief found at http://www.lambdalegal.org/binary-data/LAMBDA_PDF/pdf/182.pdf.
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