Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)

Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld, by a 5 to 4 vote, a Georgia law criminalizing oral and anal sex between consenting adults in private. The case began when Michael Hardwick was charged after a police officer entered his Atlanta home. Justice Byron White's majority opinion held that the Constitution conferred no fundamental right to engage in what it called homosexual sodomy. The ruling was a serious setback for LGBTQ+ rights and left sodomy laws standing across the country. The Court reversed itself 17 years later in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which recognized that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to private, consensual intimacy.