It was indeed very offensive to hear the attorney from the DA's office repeatedly refer to her side as "the people". I didn't think there was much hope in Starchild's motion to not have her refer to him as "the defendant". A better motion might have been to ask that she instead say "the accused", and that her side be called "the prosecution" instead of "the people". Not one of "the people" in the court's audience seemed to favor the prosecution, and almost all of us seem to be on Starchild's side. If I were Starchild I'd ask my supporters to all try to wear the same color shirt and to sit right behind him on his side of the room. I hope Starchild's attorney's written motion to dismiss made the point more clearly than she did in oral argument that Lawrence v. Texas arguably limited its implications to only public prostitution when it said the conduct at issue "does not involve public conduct or prostitution." The Lawrence opinion is all about the privacy of the conduct in that case, and Starchild's alleged solicitation apparently was behind the closed doors of a private hotel room. The first sentence of the opinion says: "Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places." She should have also mentioned that Scalia's dissent said that Lawrence calls all prostitution laws into question. He wrote: "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today's decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding." Prostitution is mentioned only once in the Lawrence oral argument. The attorney for Lawrence unfortunately tries to distinguish prostitution from the conduct at issue, and I'm assuming the last two words are somehow misquoted:: As for adultery and all of the other parade of horribles which people have raised in their briefs, it seems to me you've got to look at the individual interests and the State interests and their dramatically different in all of those cases incest, prostitution, all of these -- bestiality, all of these things either there's very little individual interests or there's very heightened State interest or both, in all of those cases, so the idea that by recognizing the right of all adult couples to make choices like this in their own home the Court is going to open up a whole can of worms, I submit, is correct.
