THE US: Five years ago police burst into the Texas apartment of Mr John Geddes Lawrence and found him having sex with Mr Tyron Garner. The police had been called by a neighbour with a grudge who had falsely complained that a man was "going crazy" in the apartment.
Mr Lawrence and Mr Garner were arrested and charged with violating Texas's sodomy laws. They each had to pay a fine of $200 and spend a night in jail.
There was outrage in the American gay rights movement that two men were convicted for what they did in the privacy of a bedroom.
The case was fought all the way to the Supreme Court which, in a ruling yesterday that has major implications for the rights of gay people in the United States, struck down the ban on gay sex, ruling that the Texas law was an unconstitutional violation of privacy.
Such a law "demeans the lives of homosexual persons", said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, concluding that the two men "were entitled to respect for their private lives".
"The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," he said.
Mr Kennedy rejected the argument of Texas that communities had a right to promote their own standards of morality and defend the institutions of marriage and family.
Texas officials said the state wanted a constitutional line drawn "at the threshold of the marital bedroom", and some supporters of its case, many from conservative religious groups, expressed concern that a ruling against Texas could lead eventually to the acceptance of same sex marriages.
Thirteen US states will now have to scrap their anti-sodomy laws. As recently as 1960, all 50 states had such a law on their statute books but 37 had since dropped them.
However, in Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, oral and anal sex between same-sex couples is still an offence against the law, and in another nine states - Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia - consensual sodomy is banned for everyone.
The 6-3 Supreme Court decision reverses a ruling 17 years ago that states could punish homosexuals for "deviant sex", though the law was rarely enacted.
States now may not criminalise the private behaviour of consenting adults in a bedroom and Texas will have to invalidate its law banning "deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex".
Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O'Connor voted for the decision while the three most conservative members of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, dissented.
In his minority report, Justice Scalia said: "The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," and had "taken sides in the culture wars". The Supreme Court also ruled 5-4 yesterday to strike down a 1994 California law that allowed prosecutions for sex crimes committed in the distant past, saying that a state cannot retroactively erase statutes of limitations.
This is a setback for many cases taken against priests for abuse against minors decades ago. The ruling came in an appeal by a 72-year-old man charged with molesting his daughters when they were children.
Justice Stephen Breyer said the constitution barred states from revising already expired legal deadlines. The law has implications for charges in other areas, such as terrorism.