Michael Hardwick (Bowers vs. Hardwick)

In 1982, a police officer went to arrived at the home of Michael Hardwick, an Atlanta man who worked at a local gay bar to serve him with an arrest warrant for missing a court date.

Hardwick had friends sleeping over from the night before, so when the officer arrived at the house, one man who was sleeping on the couch let the officer in. When the officer opened the door of a bedroom, he saw Hardwick engaging in consensual, oral sex with another man on his bed. Both men were arrested for sodomy, which at that time was defined as any type of oral or anal sex by homosexuals or heterosexuals.

Hardwick sued Michael Bowers, the Georgia attorney general in federal court saying that the sodomy law was invalid. He said that any homosexual would be liable for the same activities. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) fought the case on Hardwick's behalf, which reached the lower federal court. It decided in Hardwick's favor, but the State of Georgia wanted to overturn that decision, so the case went to the Supreme Court.

In 1986, Chief Justice Warren E. Berger upheld the decision that criminalized private oral and anal sex between consenting adults (although homosexuals were often the only ones prosecuted), referring to Sir William Blackstone's description of sodomy as “a crime not fit to be named.” He also said that, “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.”

Justice Lewis Powell was considered the deciding vote in the case. Many thought his vote was influenced by the fact that he didn't believe he had known any homosexuals--unaware that one of his own law clerks was gay. After he retired from the Court three years later, he publicly stated that he regretted his vote in the case.

In the years that followed, several states struck down their own sodomy laws under privacy provisions. In 1998, the Georgia Supreme Court finally struck down the state's sodomy law (except for minors) that was previously upheld in Bowers vs. Hardwick. Michael Hardwick died in Gainesville, Florida from AIDS complications in 1991.

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