Not only in folklore do historical watersheds spring from trickles. We all have heard that Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lamp to start the Chicago fire, and even sober history texts tell us that one Gavrilo Princip started World War I. Princip was a politically overactive Serbian nationalist destined to die of tuberculosis in an Austrian prison, but not before immortalizing himself on June 28, 1914. That day the nineteen-year-old Princip shot and killed Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife as they rode in an open car through Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. The occasion, or excuse, for release of smoldering political tensions and blunted ambitions to remake the world order had arrived. The "war to end all wars" —The Great War—was on.

A constitutional Armageddon called Bowers v. Hardwick was detonated even more inconspicuously. Playing the role of Princip was twenty-nine-year-old Atlantan Michael Hardwick. In mid-1982 he was ticketed for carrying an open bottle of booze. He did not answer the summons, and a bench warrant was issued. The ticketing police officer went to Hardwick's home and was let in by an unknown male resident. Where was Hardwick? The man gestured toward a bedroom down a long hallway. The term coitus interruptus was about to acquire new meaning as causus bellis. Through a partly opened door the officer observed Hardwick and another man fellating, "sodomy" under a Georgia statute that apparently had not been enforced for several decades. Hardwick was arrested on the warrant and charged with sodomy.