Our legal system has better things to do than peering into bedrooms. Anne Quindlen talks about getting rid of laws that demonize consenting adults.

There is an irony in the fact that when newspapers in some states are printing the announcements of civil unions by gay men and lesbians, they are also printing the names of sexual desperadoes, breaking the law in the name of love. To resolve that peculiar dissonance does not require the high court to bow to culture change but instead to return to its own defining principles of fairness and freedom, to turn away from the prejudice that, last time out, substituted prurience for jurisprudence.