The Texas House of Representatives recently voted to repeal its 1973 law banning same-sex sexual encounters, with 12 Republican representatives joining Democrats in the historic 72-55 vote. Though the law hasn’t been enforced since 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down all anti-sodomy laws in its Lawrence v. Texas decision, Democrats have been trying to repeal it since 1983 to rid the state lawbooks of anti-gay discrimination, The Texas Tribune reported.

The bill will likely face an additional House vote on Friday before heading to the state Senate, where its fate remains unclear. Nevertheless, out gay state Rep. Venton Jones (D), the bill’s author, told the aforementioned publication, “I am standing on the shoulders of people who have carried this bill before me, and that’s where I get my strength.”

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In a Thursday House floor speech, Jones told his legislative colleagues that he wasn’t asking them to vote on whether they agreed with the court’s 2003 ruling, adding, “Instead, I’m asking you to vote for a law that upholds the principles that Texans should have the freedom and ability to make their own private decisions without unwarranted government interference.”

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Jones said he felt it was especially important to repeal the law now since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Court should “reconsider” the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision.

Though Texas’ “zombie law” against sodomy hasn’t been enforced since the court’s 2003 ruling, if Lawrence v. Texas were overturned by a future Supreme Court, Texas’ law would go back into effect, leaving LGBTQ+ individuals subject to possible criminal persecution for consensual, behind-closed-doors encounters.

“It was already past time to do this, and now even more so,” Jones said.

Republican state Rep. Brian Harrison, a politician who often accuses GOP colleagues of being insufficiently conservative, co-authored the bill, saying, “Criminalizing homosexuality is not the role of government, and I support repealing it…. [I] will continue consistently fighting for limited government and individual liberty.“

Harrison also pointed out that one of the state’s U.S. senators, Republican Ted Cruz, has supported repealing the law.

In July 2022, a Cruz spokesperson called the law “an uncommonly silly law,” adding, “Consenting adults should be able to do what they wish in their private sexual activity, and government has no business in their bedrooms.”

When asked by The Dallas Morning News in 2022, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), state Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), and Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan (R) all declined to comment on the possibility of repealing the state sodomy law. Earlier in 2022, the Texas GOP adopted a platform that called homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice.”

In June 2022, Texas’ rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said that he would be willing to defend a state law that would challenge Lawrence v. Texas. In the early 2000s, Paxton was a vocal supporter of putting gay people in jail for what was then the crime of having sex, something he believed was necessary for “public health” and to “discourage sexual activity outside of marriage.”

Paxton, back when he was a Texas state representative, was one of several lawmakers who signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to decide in favor of Texas’ sodomy ban, arguing that such bans help maintain “public health.”

The brief brought up statistics that show that HIV hit gay and bi men particularly hard, but didn’t show how sodomy laws, which make prevention and treatment measures for HIV more difficult, are related to this.

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