2017-05-13

Cato: Adult Rights for Adult Businesses

An ordinance of the City of Sandy Springs, Georgia, prohibits the sale of sex toys. Businesses and individuals have challenged this statute as unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause in controlling their consensual, sexual behavior in the privacy of their homes. The district court and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the ordinance given the Eleventh Circuit precedent of Williams v. Attorney General (2004), which upheld an Alabama sex-toy-sales ban.

Cato has now joined the DKT Liberty Project on a brief to the entire (en banc) Eleventh Circuit asking it to overturn Williams, which is inconsistent with more recent Supreme Court precedent in United States v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) (the DOMA and same-sex marriage cases, respectively). Williams had relied on Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), where the Supreme Court declared that for a right to be protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, its specific articulation must be “deeply rooted in our history and traditions” or “fundamental to our concept of constitutionally ordered liberty.”

Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/adult-rights-adult-businesses

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