Brief of Petitioners

The State of Texas arrested Petitioners Lawrence and Garner, charged them with a crime, and convicted them under the State's "Homosexual Conduct" law for engaging in consensual same-sex intimacy in the privacy of Lawrence's home. The Texas law and Petitioners' convictions are constitutionally indefensible for two reasons. First, the law discriminates without a legitimate and rational State purpose, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In 1973, Texas broke with both the evenhanded laws of the past and the decisive modern trend toward decriminalization. Instead, the State chose to criminalize consensual, adult sexual behaviors only for those whose partners are of the same sex—gay men and lesbians. Texas's decision to classify along that line brands gay men and lesbians as lawbreakers and fuels a whole range of further discrimination, effectively relegating them to a form of second-class citizenship. Second, this criminal law directly implicates fundamental interests in intimate relationships, bodily integrity, and the home. Texas's law and the few other remaining consensual sodomy statutes—both those that discriminate and those that do not—trample on the substantive liberty protections that the Constitution erects in order to preserve a private sphere shielded from government intrusion. Here, where the State authorizes such intrusion into the homes and lives only of same sex couples, the constitutional injury is especially clear and disturbing.