The majority opinion, by Justice Byron White, reasoned that the U.S. Constitution did not confer "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy".

Burger concluded: "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

Blackmun's dissent accused the Court of an "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and an "overall refusal to consider the broad principles that have informed our treatment of privacy in specific cases."

[5][6] Seventeen years after Bowers, the Supreme Court directly overruled its decision in Lawrence v. Texas, holding that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

[9] Hardwick then sued Michael Bowers, the attorney general of Georgia, in federal court for a declaratory judgment that the state's sodomy law was invalid.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been searching for a "perfect test case" to challenge anti-sodomy laws, and Hardwick's cause presented the one they were looking for.

A heterosexual married couple was initially named in the suit as plaintiffs John and Mary Doe, alleging that they wished to engage in sodomy but were prevented from doing so by the Georgia anti-sodomy law.

Since 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut,[15] the Court had held that a right to privacy was implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The majority opinion in Bowers, written by Justice Byron White, framed the legal question as to whether the Constitution confers "a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy."

The opinion answered this question in the negative, stating that "to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty is, at best, facetious."

Justice White added a slippery slope warning about undesirable potential implications for other sex laws: And if respondent's submission is limited to the voluntary sexual conduct between consenting adults, it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct [478 U.S. 186, 196] while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home.

We are unwilling to start down that road.The short concurring opinion by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger emphasized historical negative attitudes toward homosexual sex, quoting Sir William Blackstone's characterization of sodomy as "a crime not fit to be named" and an offense of "deeper malignity" than rape.

[2] Burger concluded, "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

He voiced doubts about the compatibility of Georgia's law with the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, noting that even consensual sodomy could be punished with up to twenty years in prison, the same sentence as an aggravated battery or first-degree arson.

He had initially voted to strike down the law but changed his mind after conservative clerk Michael W. Mosman advised him to uphold the ban.

Blackmun wrote, "Only the most willful blindness could obscure the fact that sexual intimacy is 'a sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare, and the development of human personality'", quoting from Burger's opinion in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, which held that obscene films are not constitutionally protected.

[31] Bowers was decided at a time when the court's privacy jurisprudence, and in particular the right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade[32] had come under heavy criticism.

[35] In 1990, three years after retiring from the Court, Powell told a group of New York University law students that he considered his opinion in Bowers an error, saying, "I do think it was inconsistent in a general way with Roe.

[36][34] In 2003, the remaining sodomy laws in 13 states were invalidated, insofar as they applied to private consensual conduct among adults, by the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which explicitly overturned Bowers.

[42] In the movie The Pelican Brief, there is a scene of a classroom in Tulane University in which the instructor and students discuss this case, with Julia Roberts' character, Darby Shaw, saying that the Court's decision was wrong.