In 1986 the United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of a Georgia statute under which Michael Hardwick had been charged with committing “sodomy” in his home with another adult male. The Court began its analysis by disavowing any concern with “whether laws against sodomy between consenting adults in general, or between homosexuals in particular, are wise or desirable.” Rather, the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick formulated its judicial task in the following blunt terms: to determine “whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.”1 The answer to that question could of course only be negative. An argument to the contrary was, in the Court’s notorious phrase, “at best, facetious.”2
