Texas AG Ken Paxton would defend sodomy law if SCOTUS revisits Lawrence same-sex
One of the cases mentioned by Thomas was Lawrence v. Texas, which prevents states from banning intimate same-sex relationships. The landmark 2003 ruling struck down a 1973 Texas law that criminalized the act of sodomy. But as Roe v. Wade was overturned, Paxton said he would defend the state’s defunct sodomy law if the Supreme Court were to follow Thomas’s remarks and eventually revisits Lawrence.
“I mean, there’s all kinds of issues here, but certainly the Supreme Court has stepped into issues that I don’t think there’s any constitutional provision dealing with,” Paxton said in a Friday interview with NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert. “They were legislative issues, and this is one of those issues, and there may be more. So it would depend on the issue and dependent on what state law had said at the time.”
When asked whether the Texas legislature would pass a similar sodomy law and if Paxton would defend it and bring it to the Supreme Court, the Republican attorney general, who is running for reelection in November, suggested he would be comfortable supporting a law outlawing intimate same-sex relationships.
“Yeah, look, my job is to defend state law, and I’ll continue to do that,” Paxton said to Vittert. “That is my job under the Constitution, and I’m certainly willing and able to do that.”
A spokesman for Paxton did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
The attorney general’s support of a sodomy law comes as Texas is among the 13 states with “trigger bans,” designed to take effect once Roe was struck down, that will prohibit abortion within 30 days. Before last week’s Supreme Court decision, Texas had already restricted abortions to the first six weeks of pregnancy, when many people do not yet realize they are pregnant. Paxton had also issued an advisory that prosecutors could pursue criminal cases under an unenforced 1925 state law before the trigger ban began.
On Tuesday, Harris County Judge Christine Weems (D) granted a temporary restraining order to allow clinics to offer abortions for at least two weeks without criminal prosecution. Weems ruled that a pre-Roe ban enforced by Paxton and prosecutors would “inevitably and irreparably chill the provision of abortions in the vital last weeks in which safer abortion care remains available and lawful in Texas.”
Following Friday’s culture-shaking opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, health advocates, legal experts and Democrats are wondering whether the Supreme Court’s conservative majority could eye to overturn…
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