Respondent's Brief

³⁰ See Michael McConnell, The Role of Democratic Politics in Transforming Moral Convictions into Law, 98 Yale L. Rev. 1501 (1989), arguing that deference to traditions of morality is "natural and inevitable …but it is also sensible":

An individual has only his own, necessarily limited, intelligence and experience (personal and vicarious) to draw upon. Tradition, by contrast, is composed of the cumulative thoughts and experiences of thousands of individuals over an expanse of time, each of them making incremental and experimental alterations (often unconsciously), which are then adopted or rejected (again, often unconsciously) on the basis of experience—the experience, that is, of whether they advance the good life.

³¹ In fact, although the statute is unlikely to deter many individuals with an exclusively homosexual orientation, the Legislature rationally could have concluded that section 21.06 would be effective to some degree in deterring the remaining population (i.e., persons with a heterosexual or bisexual orientation) from detrimentally experimenting in homosexual conduct.