http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/docket/2002/march.html#02-102
Grab a pot of coffee and Acrobat reader and have yourself a big bowl of sexual politics. The Amicus Curiae response in favor of the Texas sodomy law are some fine reading, brought to me courtesy the Psychoceramics mailing list.
Personally I’m not interested in having any sodomy in Texas or elsewhere, so it’s academic for me. But I’m fascinated by the loopy reasoning some people have for wanting to prohibit it by law.
Be My Blog 
In case it changes your answer, I was under the impression that the legal definition of “sodomy” also includes heterosexual oral sex. (But I haven’t read the legal documents, because lawyers do not make me hot.)
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Well, I’m not getting much of that either 😉 I think I’m far more opposed to Texas than to sodomy by any definition of sodomy, anyway.
Some of those documents get really, really wacky.
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That’s a rather tender subject…another slice?
I heard them chatting about this on NPR the other morning (you can probably find the audio on their website if you are interested). They (conservative Texans) are trying to lump homosexual sex (a victimless quote-unquote-crime) in with evil sex crimes (rape, incest, etc.) While privacy in the bedroom is a right, privacy during such evil sex crimes is not. They are just trying to decide on what exactly “evil sex crimes” includes. I am not much of a lawyer, either–I am getting good at the syntax of dockets, but not yet the semantics–but since is a budding lawyerette, she may be able to shed some light on all this.
According to an online version of Black’s, sodomy is any “unnatural” sex act, including man/man, woman/woman, and human/animal. It says nothing about oral sex, but I could see how a conservative court might rule it as a crime against nature. Does lumping together gay sex with beastiality strike anyone else as too broad a definition?!
—standard boilerplate…blah, blah, my own opinions, blah, blah, not a professional, blah, blah, closed course professional driver, blah, blah…
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Re: That’s a rather tender subject…another slice?
Many states in the US have sodomy laws: see http://www.sodomylaws.org for the details there, but they tend to cover oral and/or anal intercourse, regardless of the gender of the participants. 4 states (Texas is one of them) have sodomy laws that make only same-sex activities crimes.
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i heard npr’s take on this today… in the form of dialog from the justice’s and what not… that texas place is weird =P
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Cool icon. Is it new?
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had it for about a month. i’ve been wanting to do a lamerbus icon ever since i saw one of those buses!
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When I saw a couple go by recently, I thought of you. 🙂
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I read a law review article that was published shortly after the Bowers v. Hardwick decision that basically said that, at the time, sodomy laws encompassed oral sex between consenting adults of the opposite sex, but it was only enforced against homosexual men engaged in whatever sort of sex that happened to be having.
I wish I had more time this morning to read all the Amicus briefs. Perchance, I will read them this evening and have a better grasp on the issues. It should be an interesting case because after the Bowers v. Hardwick decision there was a case called Romer v. Evans in which the Supreme Court basically said that descriminating against people becausee they are gay or lesbian was uncool. In his vitriolic dissent, Scalia cited the Bowers decision and basically claimed that the Romer decision flew in the face of that precedent and then went on to compare homosexuals to pedophiles and murderers and also made it clear that the good people of Colorado had every right to deplore the gay folk’s obviously deplorable behavior. And people wonder why he scares me. Sheesh. It’s more complicated than that, but I have to go to work now.
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For your double shot of disturbment, check out Slate’s digest of the Supreme Court arguments.
Go, Justice Scalia!
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