One of Donald Trump’s prospective picks for the Supreme Court believes gay people should be prosecuted for having sex because they are not protected by the constitution. While serving as Alabama’s Attorney General in 2003, William H Pryor Jr wrote a legal brief in defence of a Texan law –
later struck down by the Supreme Court – which criminalised consensual gay sex.
He compared it to “polygamy, incest, paedophilia, prostitution, and adultery” and said the Alabama court had “never recognised a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy”.
“Such a right would be antithetical to the
‘traditional relation of the family’ that is as old and as fundamental as our entire civilisation”, he added.
But he also said that anal sex between heterosexual partners was acceptable because it was not as bad as homosexual sex.
He explained: “Texas is hardly alone in concluding that
homosexual sodomy may have severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences, which do not necessarily attend heterosexual sodomy, and from which Texas’s citizens need to be protected”.
He claimed that people did not have the right to engage in whatever consensual sex they liked behind closed doors because “homosexual sodomy has not historically been recognised in this country as a right; to the contrary, it has historically been recognised as a wrong. It is not a fundamental right”.