Social Issues Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Social Issues - Assign workforcet ExampleIntroduction One of the key arguments of the civil rights together with Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LBGT) movements declare for long advocated is the fact that the state has no rights in determining or getting itself involved in what happens between two consenting adults in the concealment of their bedroom (Querbes, 2004). In these two cases, first in Georgia and then in Texas, police officers came into the citizens home and found him and his partner engaging in the act of consensual anal intercourse, which was outlawed in these states. In the first case, even after the Georgia royal court and the Court of Appeal had control in estimation of the respondent, the Supreme Court overturned the conclusion and ruled that sodomy was not a fundamental right. In the second case, the Supreme Court basically ruled that they had no right to interfere with what happened in the confines of the bedrooms of consenting adults (Querbes, 2004). 1 There were numerous societal factors that led the US Supreme Court to quit the rule of stare decisis. The stare decisis is a principle that basically holds that judges usually allow previously made decisions to stand. In the case of Lawrence v. Texas the Supreme Court saw need to completely rule in the opposite of the judgment in Bowers v. Hardwick due mainly to the changes in attitudes, perceptions and views on homosexuality in the state (Harms, 2011). In 1986 when the initial Bowers v. Hardwick decision was made the country had just come out of the rather freewheeling permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s and a decidedly conservative candor was more the norm (Hanon, 1999). It was therefore no wonder that more than half the states still had rules in place that outlawed sodomy which was viewed as one of the practices that many felt made homosexuality abhorrent. The American society then was much much stronger in intolerance with the homosexual modus vivendi (Harms, 2011). Fo r the court also by the time the second (Lawrence v. Texas) decision was taken there had been quite a change in the Supreme Court with more or less half (four out of nine) judges having either retired or died and been replaced, giving the Supreme Court a totally new outlook which made it easier for them to make such(prenominal) a radical change in decision. The majority in the Bowers v. The Hardwick decision was only 5-4 and one of the judges in the majority later changed his opinion and verbalise he would have voted differently had he thought the matter was as important as it turned out to be (Harms, 2011). Historically mainstream United States goal has always condemned homosexuality and any other type of deviant sexual practices hence the enactment of anti-sodomy laws in many US states up to the eighties. Gay men and women were seen and depicted as degenerates and sexual criminals and they, their practices, views and lifestyles by the medical profession, government and the mass media. In the early 1980s, the Bowers v. Hardwick was therefore not an unpopular or an unusual decision at the time that it was made. 2 At the time of the Bowers v. A Hardwick case in 1986, the American publics attitude toward homosexuality was very conservative. In fact as late as 1988, only