A New York Times editorial in today’s paper looks at whether the majority is still as free as it had been to impose its morality through the law:
[…]
The Alabama Supreme Court sided with the 11th Circuit court. “Public morality,” the majority said, “can still serve as a legitimate rational basis for regulating commercial activity.”
What these courts are fighting about is just how far the Supreme Court went on privacy law in deciding the Texas case. In 1986, the court upheld Georgia’s criminal sodomy statute and the arrest of a man for having consensual sex in his own home, reasoning that that law is based on notions of morality. Seven years later, in Lawrence v. Texas, the court ruled that a governing majority’s view that a particular practice is immoral is not reason enough to outlaw it.
Read the entire editorial in The New York Times.