Justice Stephen Breyer asks one of his famed three-part questions and, when Rosenthal doesn't answer immediately, Breyer interrupts: "That's not my question. I'd like to hear your straight answer." The gallery busts up. Rosenthal says there's a good place to draw the line of privacy and fundamental rights, and that line is "at the bedroom door."

"But the line is at the bedroom door in this case!" yelps Breyer. To which Rosenthal says something suggesting that the two co-plaintiffs (who have been fighting this case together since 1998) may not have been having consensual sex.

Breyer, quoting shamed Oxonian Tom Brown, adds that the whole justification for this law can be reduced to: "I do not like thee Dr. Fell/ The reason why I cannot tell." Breyer asks whether Texas could make it against the law to "tell really serious lies" at the dinner table, and when Rosenthal sounds like he's about to say Texas can, Scalia interrupts to say, "Don't you think what laws a state can constitutionally pass has something to do with the sorts of laws that have a long tradition of being passed?"

"Certainly," says Rosenthal.

Justice David Souter asks whether Texas really has a 200-year tradition of criminalizing gay sodomy. "Was this law on the books in 1803?" he asks.

"Texas wasn't a state in 1803," offers Rosenthal.

"Good question!" applauds Scalia. "Don't fall into that trap!!"

Breyer notes that during World War I people also thought it "immoral" to "teach German in schools. … Immoral is a hard line to draw."

"There is a rational basis," insists Rosenthal.

"You're not giving us a rational basis," snaps Breyer.

"The rational basis," says Scalia, "is that the state thinks it's immoral. Like bigamy or adultery."

"Or teaching German," grins Breyer.

Souter wonders why Texas doesn't limit sodomy among heterosexuals. "Because it can lead to marriage and procreation," says Rosenthal.

Editor's Note: This article has been corrected since its original publication. Justice Stephen Breyer did not invoke the phrase, "I do not like this, Sam I Am," but rather the phrase, "I do not love thee, Dr. Fell; the reason why I cannot tell." TAP Online regrets the error.

Many teenagers said that with the limits on teaching, and with parents who are uncomfortable discussing sex in detail, they learn much of what they know from experience. Some young women here [Lubbock, TX], under the mistaken belief that they can get pregnant through oral sex, refer to their children as "spit babies."

Smith replies that there would need to be some showing that gay kindergarten teachers produce harm to children. Scalia offers one: "Only that children might be induced to follow the path to homosexuality."

Indeed, the Times/CBS News Poll found that the number of Americans who expected the war to be won quickly dropped 9 points from Saturday to Sunday, and 10 more points from Sunday to Monday [margin of error larger than +/- 2 percentage points]. Those shifts coincided with television coverage of prisoners of war and battlefield casualties that seems to have caught at least some Americans — accustomed to the relatively bloodless victory in Afghanistan last year — by surprise.

"I think I was living in a pipe dream thinking no one would get killed," Shirley Johnson, 79, a registered Republican from Davenport, Iowa, said in a follow-up interview. "But all of a sudden people were getting killed, and I was horrified."

I think that if there were "register to vote" booths at all events, something useful and positive could come out of all the protests and marches. If there were some indication that these actions might actually effect Bush, he might pay attention. -- Matt Ball