So I’m reading the Supreme Court opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick for a PPAZ post I’m writing. The short version is that Bowers is a 1986 Supreme Court decision that upheld states’ rights to proscribe consensual same-sex sexual activity.
Don’t worry: That is not the beautiful part.
That is a line from the dissenting opinion attributed to Justice Blackmun. However, said dissent was largely written by Pamela S. Karlan. And the line itself quotes from the opinion in Paris Adult Theatere I v. Slaton, delivered by Justice Burger.
But now that I’ve gotten all the attributions out of the way — the line I heart:
Only the most willful blindness could obscure the fact that sexual intimacy is “a sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare, and the development of human personality…”
This is why respect for various sexual orientations — straight, gay, queer, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, questioning — matters so very much. Because our ability to explore and honor those aspects of ourselves is a big deal. To be denied that, for a lot of us, is tantamount to being denied a fundamental part of ourselves.
The quote goes on:
he fact that individuals define themselves in a significant way through their intimate sexual relationships with others suggests, in a Nation as diverse as ours, that there may be many “right” ways of conducting those relationships, and that much of the richness of a relationship will come from the freedom an individual has to choose the form and nature of these intensely personal bonds.