Harold Ford had a rocky appearance at a meeting of the New York Stonewall Democrats. The umbrella national group was founded by Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, and is named after the Stonewall riots in 1969.
Given Harold Ford's poor record on gay rights, this was about what was expected. It wasn't a meeting of his BoA friends at the Meryll Lynch boardroom.
As surreal as that moment must've been, this particularly caught my eye:
Ford didn't do himself any favors by asking a questioner to clarify what "Lawrence v. Texas" was.
Wait, what? How could Ford not know what Lawrence v. Texas was? It was the landmark Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws. And since "sodomy" was generally used to describe what was deemed as "crimes against nature" -- mainly anal and oral sex, these laws were frequently used to criminalize homosexual behavior. For example, in Connecticut, in 1970:
Connecticut’s Commissioner of Motor Vehicles John Tynan denies a driver’s license to a man with a sodomy conviction on his record, saying the man “is an admitted homosexual” and “his homosexuality makes him an improper person to hold an operator’s license.” Connecticut Attorney General Robert Killian upholds Tynan’s decision. The man denied his license later commits suicide.
The Lawrence case was sparked by such an outrageous intrusion into the private lives of consensual adults. From the decision itself (citations removed):
In Houston, Texas, officers of the Harris County Police Department were dispatched to a private residence in response to a reported weapons disturbance. They entered an apartment where one of the petitioners, John Geddes Lawrence, resided. The right of the police to enter does not seem to have been questioned. The officers observed Lawrence and another man, Tyron Garner, engaging in a sexual act. The two petitioners were arrested, held in custody over night, and charged and convicted before a Justice of the Peace.
The complaints described their crime as “deviate sexual intercourse, namely anal sex, with a member of the same sex (man).” The applicable state law [...] provides: “A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.” The statute defines “[d]eviate sexual intercourse” as follows:
“(A) any contact between any part of the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person; or
“(B) the penetration of the genitals or the anus of another person with an object.”
The officers were called in by a false report (by a jilted lover) of weapons in the apartment. Finding none, that should've been the end of it. But of course, it wasn't, and the two men were arrested for the crime of being gay.
In 1998.
You can imagine how useless the Texas judiciary was on the issue. Those guys are elected. They weren't about to incur the wrath of you-know-who. So it was up to the Supreme Court. In their stunning 6-3 decision (with Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist dissenting), the Supreme Court properly identified the fundamental issue at stake:
[Sodomy laws] are, to be sure, statutes that purport to do no more than prohibit a particular sexual act. Their penalties and purposes, though, have more far-reaching consequences, touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home. The statutes do seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals.
And their holding affirmed that liberty interest:
First, the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice; neither history nor tradition could save a law prohibiting miscegenation from constitutional attack. Second, individual decisions by married persons, concerning the intimacies of their physical relationship, even when not intended to produce offspring, are a form of “liberty” protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, this protection extends to intimate choices by unmarried as well as married persons.”
This is THE decision that affirmed the legality of homosexuality. It is one of the most important decisions of the 2000s, and likely in the court's history. And it was a BIG DEAL when it came out. As Atrios reminisces:
I was in Spain when the Lawrence v. Texas decision was coming out "any day now" and I popped into internet cafes about every hour because it, you know, mattered.
Anyone paying attention to politics at the time would've known about the decision, and Ford was in Congress at the time. The Christian Right went nuts. Gay groups hailed it! There was a big commotion!
Then again, perhaps Harold has a good excuse. The decision WAS made back when he was hating on gays. I mean, this is the guy, who in 2006, went off the deep end when the New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the importance of equal protection under the law (not gay marriage):
I do not support the decision today reached by the New Jersey Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November there's a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage - I am voting for it.
He was a lovely guy back then. And he's still as sleazy today, with a dash of "ignorant" thrown in for good measure.