It's possible that this is a pure case of administrative and prosecutorial laziness—it's a lot of trouble to make constant codebook revisions in state legislatures. And the prosecutors in last week's appeals case, Williams v. Alabama, may not have done their homework and read up on high-profile Supreme Court rulings from the past decade.

But probably not. "There’s a small minority that views laws as 'expressive functions.' They want them on the codebooks," even if they've been ruled unconstitutional in higher courts, said Krotoszynski. In other words, sexual morality laws aren't just laws; they're symbols, too. This case points to the many symbolic anachronisms in the state's legal code—like the fact that a man cannot be legally convicted of raping another man. As the laws are written, consensual sodomy is banned in Alabama. Even though that's unconstitutional, it's not meaningless.

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"There's a famous Alabama case saying that sodomy is such a detestable crime that it didn't need further definition." Joseph Colquitt, a law professor at the University of Alabama, chuckled at the thought: a legal definition based on a lack of definition. In the 1970s, he was one of the legal reporters who helped draft Alabama's original sexual-assault statutes; around this time, many states were trying to codify definitions that had previously been "common law," or generally accepted standards based on precedents.

Indeed, a 1969 Alabama appeals-court decision described sodomy this way: "It is characterized as as abominable, detestable, unmentionable, and too disgusting and well-known to require other definition or further details or description."

"A lot of states retain the idea that it was against the law for persons of whatever gender to engage in sodomy activity; it was a word used in common law," Colquitt said. "Everyone knew what sodomy was: It’s a crime against nature."

But the 1970s law had at least one very clear intention: criminalizing gay sex. In the original draft, the commentary says, the ban against "sexual misconduct" was all about consent: If someone made any kind of unwanted sexual conduct with someone else, it would be treated as a crime, the same way vaginal sex was treated. But it goes on: "If both actors were adult and both consented, there was no offense; but this subdivision was changed by the legislature to make all homosexual conduct criminal."

Consent, it notes, is "no defense."

This is where things seem to have gotten tricky in last week's ruling in Alabama. According to court documents, Dewayne Williams was staying at a motel in Selma on January 10, 2010. After hanging around the lobby for most of the day, the prosecution alleges, Williams grabbed a staff member, A.R., "by his throat and pushed him into the bathroom in the office. Williams told A.R. to not say anything or scream and that if A.R. did, Williams would choke A.R. harder. ... Williams proceeded to sodomize A.R."