As lawyers around the country absorb the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which on Friday morning said the 14th Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize those marriages from other states, Georgia played a notable role in the history of the legal rights of gay people.
A challenge to its state sodomy law was the vehicle for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1986 declaration that there was no fundamental right to gay sex. Ironically, that decision remained the law of the land even as the Georgia Supreme Court in 1998 took a different approach under the state’s constitution. The legal controversy over sodomy laws would give way to the debate over the right to same-sex marriage, which remained illegal in Georgia while the U.S. Supreme Court considered the decision that was announced Friday.
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