On August 3rd, 1982, a police officer in Atlanta, Georgia went to the home of Michael Hardwick to serve him with a warrant for a traffic violation. Once inside Hardwick's home, the officer witnessed Hardwick having sex with another man. Hardwick was arrested and charged with sodomy for having consensual sex with another adult in his own home. The case eventually went before the United States Supreme Court, where activists hoped that sodomy laws would be ruled unconstitutional violations of privacy.

The decision handed down in 1986 was one of the most devastating setbacks for gay rights of the entire decade. By a vote of 5-to-4, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law and ruled that "there is no Constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy." Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote. Years later, Powell said he regretted his vote on Bowers and now felt that the dissent "had the better of the arguments."

One decade later, however, in 1996, the Supreme Court ignored the precedent set by Bowers in handing gay and lesbian activists an equally significant victory in Roemer v. Evans. In Roemer, the court overturned Colorado's Amendment 2, which prohibited state and local gay rights ordinances. In ruling that "a state cannot so deem a class of person a stranger to its laws," the court held that gay-rights laws were not creating "special rights" for homosexuals, as conservatives argued, but guaranteeing gay men and lesbians the same rights enjoyed by all Americans, rights to which they are equally entitled.

Sources: Miller Rubenstein

Source:Miller