Talk:Bowers v. Hardwick

message: I'm going to revert  because I believe that the overturn of this ruling is a central aspect of a contemporary neutral discussion of it, and therefore per WP:MOSBEGIN, it should be mentioned in the first paragraph.  To avoid edit warring I won't revert again if it's re-removed, without first seeking further discussion here.  But if someone decides to remove the info again, they should explain their reasoning. 67.119.3.105 (talk) 21:46, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh I see now, the version I reverted said "later overturned", and I mis-read the diff.  I still prefer my version but the info is at least present in both.  A phrasing that just said "overturned in 2003" would IMHO be fine if there's a way to make it flow.  Sticking it into the previous existing wording just seems a bit awkward, so I've left in the added sentence explicitly mentioning Lawrence. 67.119.3.105 (talk) 23:11, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: overturn

message: This article claims that "an incapacitated Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote" in this case. That certainly doesn't sound like it's true the way our article currently reads. Who's wrong? --BDD (talk) 02:36, 20 February 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Powell "incapacitated"?

message: "A heterosexual married couple was initially named in the suit as plaintiffs John and Mary Doe,[citation needed] alleging that they wished to engage in sodomy[citation needed] but were prevented from doing so by the Georgia anti-sodomy law.[citation needed] However, they failed to obtain standing[citation needed] and were dropped from the suit.[citation needed]"
If there is literally no proof for this information available, why is it still on the page? Does anyone have any source for this at all?
76.99.201.202 (talk) 18:11, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: It's in the opinion of the court, I have added a citation to the claim. You can read it yourself over on Cornell's website, just CTRL+F search for "Mary Doe" and it shows up. Respectfully, InsaneHacker (💬) 09:03, 24 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  John and Mary Doe 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: @KlayCax you reverted my changes to the lede which reworded a sentence which claimed Bowers to be  The sentence asserts the key positions that it was (1)  and (2) that this is primarily because of .
I don't think the sources provided ( [1] [2] [3] [4] ) adequately back up either claims; for one, none of the sources back up the first (1) claim. The FindLaw source is no better than an opinion piece, and it makes no reference to any scholarly consensus or opinion regarding Bowers after it was overruled—it is practically pure opinion. The ABA piece makes two lists: one which considers the worst opinions from a conservative perspective, and another from a liberal perspective. Bowers was listed only in the liberal list, and the article states simply that it "" by liberals and nothing else.
The TIME piece did survey 34 scholars on the subject of the worst Supreme Court cases, but they limited this list to only the worst cases . The writer, Andrea Sachs, explicitly mentioned that this list was an "". Of the 34 scholars surveyed, only three—Kathryn Abrams, Ashutosh Bhagwat, and Jamal Greene—listed Bowers, and TIME did not include the case among its summary of cases most negatively received by the professors listed. 
In my opinion, the only source which holds even somewhat serious weight to the claim is the one from the Encyclopædia Britannica, but, once again, it says only that scholars  sided with the dissenters—a statement which does not back up the rather large assertion that Bowers was one of the Supreme Court's worst rulings ever. 
I think it would be better to stick to Britannica's claim that scholars generally sided with the dissenters, and as such only that claim should be included in the lede. I also don't think the claim that  is solid either. For example, if you look at the dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, two conservative giants—Scalia and Thomas—moved to defend the merits of Bowers, tenets included. Within his dissent, Scalia writes that the Court relied on the central holding in Bowers for a couple of other cases (i.e. Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc.) and bemoaned, "" GuardianH (talk) 23:19, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bowers' standing as "among the worst rulings ever"