"Kennedy and the majority explicitly overruled Bowers and wrote that Stevens's original reasoning, in dissent, that morality alone is not a legitimate basis to support a law was right. Scalia countered, "This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, [no law against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity] can survive rational-basis review. Kennedy, traveling further and further away from his judicial responsibility to interpret the Constitution, wrote of an "emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection" to sexual decisions and reviewed how sodomy laws had been repealed in most states and even in Europe, where the European Court of Human Rights found sodomy laws invalid under the European Convention on Human Rights. Kennedy concluded with a lecture about liberty: "The petitioners are entitled to respect their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government... The Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual." (Emphasis added.)"
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Justices of the Supreme Court of the United StatesLawyers from the United StatesCatholics from the United StatesStanford University alumniPeople from Sacramento
Original Language: English
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Mark Levin, Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (2004), p. 80
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_Kennedy
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Anthony Kennedy
Anthony McLeod Kennedy (born 23 July 1936) is an American lawyer and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on November 11, 1987, and took the oath of office on February 18, 1988. Kennedy became the most senior Associate Justice on the court following the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016. Kennedy retired in July 2018.
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