The Louisiana House overwhelmingly rejected a repeal of the state’s unconstitutional anti-sodomy law.
Rep. Patricia Smith sought to re- move consensual sex between people of the same sex from Louisiana’s crimes against nature law.
She brought the bill after Baton Rouge area police arrested gay men using the law but could not charge them because the district attorney said the law was unenforceable.
Smith said the bill would help police officers do their jobs more efficiently by getting rid of an unusable law.
“The bill only removes unconstitutional language,” she said.
But Smith could not win the backing of the House, which voted against her repeal proposal. The bill was also opposed by religious and conservative organizations.
“Anti sodomy laws that target gay sex are a function of the 20th century,” Loyola law professor, M. Isabel Medina, said.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional, Louisiana representative, Valerie Hodges, objected to the measure, saying that the law protects children and upholds morality.
“It’s a vote of conscience,” Hodges said.
Medina, who specializes in Amer– ican constitutional law said that a Georgia statute, similar to Louisiana’s, was challenged in Bowers v. Hardwick. By the time the case reached courts, the state decided that anti-sodomy laws were not going to be enforced in situations involving heterosexual sex, but were going to be enforced in situa– tions involving homosexual sex.
Courts upheld this decision by the state, Medina said, due in part to its conservative nature. Medina attributes the same characteristic as part of the reason for why Louisiana House of Representatives elected not to pass the repeal.
“There is this right to privacy that we have, and this privacy includes the
right to make choices about your body and about sexual conduct,” Medina said.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that adults have the right to engage in whatever sort of private, consensual sex they choose to, states began adjusting discriminatory bills in order to reflect this change, Medina said.
There are currently 12 states that still have anti-sodomy laws in the United States.
Medina said she wishes Louisiana wasn’t one of them.
“It was really disappointing to see that Louisiana chose not to repeal the law,” Medina said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
