O'Connor voted with that majority without offering a concurring opinion.īut 17 years later, public mores had changed, and so did the opinion of the U.S. And in a decision written by Justice Byron White, the Supreme Court majority ruled that there was no particular constitutional protection against states prohibiting specific sex acts between consenting adults. The law defined sodomy as oral or anal sex however, the prohibition extended to all persons, not just gay men. And though they were not charged under the law, they filed suit, declaring the law unconstitutional. Police walked into a private bedroom and found two men having sex and arrested them. O'Connor on gay rightsįirst there was a 1986 decision regarding a "sodomy law" in Georgia. O’Connor’s 2003 ruling appeared endangered after 20 years with a pair of cases on the court’s 2023 docket that argue affirmative action prevents Asian Americans and others from gaining admission to schools such as Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary,” O’Connor wrote in her opinion. Writing for a 5-4 majority, O’Connor said that race was just one of several factors in admissions and it helped ensure the educational benefits of a diverse student body to all.Įven so, she wasn't thrilled with maintaining such a system. The biggest case of her tenure came in 2003 when she upheld the University of Michigan law school's admissions policy that considered race. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society." Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. It is an act fraught with consequences for others: for the woman who must live with the implications of her decision for the persons who perform and assist in the procedure for the spouse, family, and society which must confront the knowledge that these procedures exist, procedures some deem nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life and, depending on one's beliefs, for the life or potential life that is aborted. "These considerations begin our analysis of the woman's interest in terminating her pregnancy but cannot end it, for this reason: though the abortion decision may originate within the zone of conscience and belief, it is more than a philosophic exercise. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. … Our cases recognize 'the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.' … Our precedents 'have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter.' … These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. "Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing and education.
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