Hypocrisy and Homophobia Struck Down

Beliefnet's senior religion producer, Deborah Caldwell, interviewed Piazza after the Supreme Court's ruling on sodomy laws was announced Thursday.

It seems to me to be rank hypocrisy, because here we have the most conservative Supreme Court justice [saying these things], yet once upon a time, conservatism in this country believed the government should not be in a private individual's life, that the government didn't have any business interfering with consenting adults in the privacy of their homes. They valued privacy rights. That's what this really is all about.

The ironic thing is that people on the right oppose hate crimes legislation, for example, saying it gives gay people special privileges or singles out gay and lesbian people as a protected class. Ironically, what this law did was that it singled out heterosexuals as a group who got special rights.

The old law didn't allow gay and lesbian folks to do something in the privacy of their own homes that heterosexuals had already been doing anyway. So the sexual act was legal for heterosexuals, but gay and lesbian people couldn't do it. So really, equal protection is at the heart of this. Gay and lesbian taxpayers deserve the same rights as heterosexual taxpayers.

One of the great things is that this happened in the midst of Gay Pride Week, and this Sunday is our gay pride celebration, so it gives us one more reason to celebrate.

But I want to point out that the law itself was essentially unenforceable. At the time of the case in the early 1980s that got to the Supreme Court in 1986, I was the executive director of the Atlanta gay center. And when Michael Hardwick was arrested I was one of the ones who founded GOALS (Georgians Opposed to Archaic Laws). The purpose of that group was to raise the money to pursue the case to the Supreme Court. Now it's all come back around. The Michael Hardwick case was also about consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. Most of the times when this law has been enforced it's been about public sex. But because the Lawrence case and the Hardwick cases were about behavior between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, the law was so unenforceable that it didn't have much daily impact on behavior.

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