If you are a gay person in Missouri, you may want to think twice about getting “intimate” with your partner this Valentine’s Day. Under current Missouri law, “sexual misconduct” is considered to be “any sexual act involving the genitals of one person and the mouth, tongue, hand or anus of another person [of the same sex].” Sexual misconduct is a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

According to the Kansas City Star, Missouri rarely prosecutes individuals under the sexual misconduct (sodomy) statute. Despite this, the law reemerged last March when six men and one woman were arrested after being caught performing sexual acts during a police raid of an adult video store in High Ridge, 20 miles southwest of St. Louis. The six men were charged with sexual misconduct under Missouri’s sodomy law while the woman was set free. The woman was released because her act was clearly of a heterosexual nature that did not “cause alarm or affront to others.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to assess the constitutionality of sodomy laws later this year. The case in question, Lawrence v. Texas, originated in 1998 when two gay Houston men were arrested and charged with “homosexual conduct” after sheriff’s deputies found them having consensual sex in a private apartment. In looking at Texas’ “homosexual conduct” law, the Supreme Court will be reexamining its infamous 1986 5-4 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which ruled that the Constitution does not extend a “fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.” The court will hear the case this spring and a decision is expected by June.

The Lawrence case could affect laws in 13 states. Along with Texas and Missouri, two other states-Kansas and Oklahoma-have made homosexual sodomy a criminal act. Nine states-Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Utah-have made both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy illegal. Most of these states define sodomy as either anal or oral sex.

Proponents of laws that ban same-sex sodomy often use morality as their trump card. The State, they claim, has an obligation to maintain standards of moral decency. Morality, however, is an ambiguous creature that can be used to serve unjust purposes. In these cases, morality is used as a fa‡ade to legally legitimize homosexual bigotry and deny gays equal protection under the law. Missouri’s law specifically targets individuals for being gay by legalizing sodomy between heterosexual individuals, while making these acts criminal for homosexuals. In the High Ridge case, this inequality is obvious by the fact that the woman was freed while the six men were prosecuted.

What makes Missouri’s law so discouraging is its symbolic meaning that the State has the right to control consensual homosexual acts done in private. Missouri legally stigmatizes homosexual Americans by condemning their acts of intimacy. By forbidding these acts, the State is claiming that homosexual sex is void of any emotional meaning and should have no place in the private sphere. What proponents of these laws fail to grasp is that private sexual acts, regardless of sexual orientation, have little effect on the public sphere. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario where private consensual acts have a tangible impact on the rights of individuals not participating in those acts.

Proponents also argue that homosexual sex poses health concerns. In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Gary Kreep, an attorney for the United Justice Foundation, a conservative nonprofit organization, argued that the nullification of state sodomy laws could “inhibit a state’s right to develop ways to protect its residents from public health dangers such as AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.” Kreep fails to realize that heterosexual sex is just as dangerous as homosexual sex when it comes to the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. To justify banning homosexual sex for health reasons, one would also have to ban heterosexual sex.

Though these laws are rarely enforced and have little effect on WU students, the mere fact that they exist symbolizes a breed of intolerance that persists in American society. Missouri’s sodomy law brands hundreds of WU students as moral outcasts. Be careful this Valentine’s Day. You may be breaking the law.

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