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a (almost) lawyer's perspective...
Blame your legislatures for this mess. When the legislators are too chickensh*t to deal with difficult social issues, they are thrown to the judiciary, which was NOT designed to deal with it. The U.S. Constitution gives NO special extra rights for homosexuals. Without getting into the complicated constitutional analysis, that basically means that a law can discriminate against them as long as the legislature has a rational purpose for the law.
Here, we have a law that says that "We think it's wrong to have sex with an underage person." But the law also says that "We think it's not as bad if the older person is pretty close in age to the younger person...like a high school senior dating a sophomore girl."
Now, court opinions have said over and over that encouraging marriage, good family values, traditional morals, etc. are valid purposes for a law. So if the legislature thinks that a 16 year old girl having sex with a 19 year old guy is not as bad as if the guy was 42 because they think that there's a greater chance that the relationship with the 19 year old guy is more "traditional", more likely to be a real relationship and not just about sex, then that is fine, under the law.
Thus, when the legislature drafts a provision in their statutory rape law giving leniency to "Romeo and Juliet" but not "Romeo and Romeo," that's ok. The recent Supreme Court opinion overruling all the sodomy statutes was based on the reasoning that the legislatures shouldn't be interfering with sex between consenting ADULTS. Underage people having sex are an entirely different matter, and legislatures are allowed to interfere more.
OK, back to my original point! The problem is NOT the courts. The problem is the moron legislators who wrote the darn law in the first place. Once a law like that is on the books, it is too scary for the politicians to replace it with something more reasonable. So they hope the courts will do it for them. That's not how the system is supposed to work - we have too many situations where the courts are writing the laws.
Every controversial Supreme Court opinion is an example of this. Roe v. Wade - if Congress had just said "states can make their own abortion laws," there would have been no problem. Each state would make their own law in response to the demands of the people. Now, every time there's a possibility that a Republican president might get to appoint someone to the Supreme Court, the pro-abortion people start freaking out and screaming that Roe v. Wade is going to be overturned and women will be chained to the kitchen sink, barefoot and pregnant.
Bush v. Gore - if Florida had better election procedures and laws in place, this mess would have never happened. It wasn't just that the punchcards were troublesome - the main problem was that there was no legal standard for how to count all those infamous hanging/dangling chads. They were using different methods in different counties, in different districts within the same county, sometimes even different pollworkers within the same district were doing different things. If a particular ballot would be counted as a vote for Gore in one place but an invalid ballot in another place, how the heck can you say what the real total was? The court couldn't step in and say after the fact, "OK, we're going to use a method they're using in District 2 of Palm Beach County - everyone please count your ballots the same way that Mrs. Edna Klingenfeld is doing it." The U.S. Supreme Court's solution was not exactly the most elegant, but it was really the best thing to do when Florida's election laws had failed to give the answer.
SO, if you don't like this kind of court opinion, write to your legislative representatives and tell them to quit being chickensh*t and write some new laws! The courts are NOT the best way to solve these problems!
[/stepping off soapbox]
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