holding that the right of privacy extends to people who engage in "deviant" sexual conduct "so long as the decisions are voluntarily made by adults in a noncommercial, private setting”
How later courts described this case
- holding that the right of privacy extends to people who engage in "deviant" sexual conduct "so long as the decisions are voluntarily made by adults in a noncommercial, private setting”
- invalidating “consensual sodomy” statute prohibiting “deviate sexual intercourse” on constitutional privacy and Equal Protection grounds because the statute “reach[ed] noncommercial, cloistered personal sexual conduct of consenting adults and ... permitted] the same conduct between persons married to each other without sanction”
- New York's sodomy law impermissibly invades "the cloak of the right of privacy... in acts of sexual intimacy ... voluntarily made by adults in a noncommercial private setting."
- involving the commission of sexual acts in an automobile parked on a public street
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by National Gay Task Force v. Board of Education, 729 F.2d 1270 (1984)
Baker and Onofre are inapplicable to the instant case.
The opinion
Jasen, J.
(concurring in result). While I cannot accept the majority’s premise that the so-called “penumbral” right to privacy which first appeared in Griswold v Connecticut ( 381 US 479 ) should be extended to encompass and protect any and all types of consensual sexual behavior in private, I nonetheless concur in result herein for I can discern no rational basis upon which the Legislature could have decided to freely allow the conduct in issue among married people and to make identical conduct criminal among those for whom that estate is undesirable or unattainable.
I hasten to add that, in my opinion, the Legislature does have the power to make moral judgments. However, that legislative power is, as all others are, limited by the supervening requirement that it be exercised with the requisite evenhandedness. Here, it was not.