AIDS AND BOWERS V. HARDWICK

During the AIDS crisis, natural law arguments have turned up again not only in relation to anti-sodomy arguments, but even as parts of important claims about AIDS prevention made by the medical and scientific community. Such arguments were invoked by the state of Georgia in the 1986 Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick , in which the Court held that the Constitution does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy. As we shall see, the Court accepted a version of legal moralism ignoring both the relevance of a right to privacy and two friend-of-the-Court briefs urging them to consider the public health implications of prohibiting homosexual sodomy. I want to argue against legal moralism both in its standard form and in a more sophisticated version that permits natural law arguments a place in legal reasoning. Natural law arguments have aggravated the AIDS crisis by contributing not only to bad law but to bad science.