And another one bites the dust.

On Friday, the Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state's exclusively homosexual sodomy law, leaving Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas as the only states in the country that continue to single out gay sex for criminal penalties.

Note that according to Data Lounge, PlanetOut's shortlist of states with criminal penalties for gay sex may be wrong: Data Lounge lists "Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah." Since I know for a fact that the Louisiana law still stands, I suspect Datalounge has a better grip on things.

I also have no idea why PlanetOut thinks that the Arkansas case will have anything to do with the Texas case. First, Texas thinks Arkansas is full of hicks. Second, absent federal constitutional issues -- and in the notorious Bowers v. Hardwick case, the Supreme Court ruled that states could criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults without offending the federal constitution because it was within our Judaeo-Christian heritage (which might give one some hint of how they'd rule should the "under God" pledge thing ever make it that far, which it won't) -- the Supreme Court in fact has no reason to hear the Texas case, and is likely to refuse certiorari altogether. I suppose it's possible that if Lambda Legal challenges the law under "cruel and unusual punishment", the court might look at it in the same way as they did the execution of the mentally retarded ... but under that rule, Bowers v. Hardwick should never have happened in the first place; even then, most states had rescinded their sodomy laws.