Texas Sodomy Law Challenge Update
PlanetOut,
September 22, 2000
SUMMARY: The full appeals court will review its panel’s ruling that struck
down the "deviant homosexual conduct" law, as Republican judge-tampering is
investigated.
Texas’ "deviant homosexual conduct" law makes it a Class C misdemeanor
for consenting adults of the same gender to engage in oral or anal intercourse even in
private, but in a split decision June 8 a three-judge panel of the state’s 14th Court
of Appeals struck down the law as a violation of the state constitution’s Equal
Rights Amendment because it applies only to gay men and lesbians (see PlanetOut News of
June 8). That ruling came in the notorious case of John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner, who in
September 1998 were literally arrested in Lawrence’s own bedroom after police
received a false report of an intruder on the premises (see PlanetOut News of November 6,
1998). On September 14 attorneys in the case received a brief note advising them that the
full bench of the 14th Court of Appeals has agreed to prosecutors’ request that they
review the case; it is not known when that opinion will be issued.
There is also a development in connection with an unusual sidebar in the case, in which
Harris County Republican Party treasurer Paul Simpson drafted a letter in July threatening
to deny campaign support to one of the judges, Justice John Anderson, unless he changed
the position he took against the sodomy law. (All the state’s judges are elected.)
Simpson never sent that letter to Anderson, although he did share it with Republican
leaders in thirteen surrounding counties (see PlanetOut News of July 19). Nevertheless
Texas’ Commission on Judicial Affairs has begun an investigation and has subpoenaed
Simpson and three others to testify regarding the matter at a hearing September 27.
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