ABSTRACT
Lawrence attempts to depict social relations such that there are only two significant types of actors: the individual and the State. The Court’s neo-conservative tradition of stripping all social features from the archetypal bearer of the right to privacy allowed it to ignore the fact that unless poor women received governmental subsidies, their right to privacy was nothing more than a hollow sham. Indeed, the Court refused to grant standing to the heterosexual couple who came forward and said that the Georgia’s facially neutral sodomy law “chilled and deterred” them from engaging in sodomy. It acknowledges that the law is not facially neutral, but then merely states that if it decided to hold the statute invalid on equal protection grounds, “some might question whether a prohibition would be valid if drawn differently, say, to prohibit the conduct both between same-sex and different-sex participants”.
