Court Opinion

ID: 9434512
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:46:51.414645+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:51.156112
License: Public Domain

Justice Thomas,
dissenting.
I join Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion. I write separately to note that the law before the Court today “is . . . uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.
Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a Member of this Court I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases ‘agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’” Id., at 530. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the *606Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 562.