The rule of Lawrence

The statute challenged in Lawrence criminalized all homosexual sex. The Lawrence Court quotes with approval Justice Stevens’s claim in his Bowers v. Hardwick dissent that “the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” The Lawrence Court does not say that the state interest has no weight but only that it lacks sufficient weight to justify the burden it places on individual liberty. Lawrence is full of language that indicates that the Court is concerned with the subordination of gays as a group, rather than just the liberty of individuals. Lawrence was to be resolved “by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.