Cite as 349 Ark. 600 (2002)
unconstitutional in line with Bates v. City of Little Rock, supra, and NAACP v. Button, supra.
Id. at 757-58, 370 S.W.2d at 84. Ultimately, we declared all four of the Acts to be unconstitutional.
Similarly, at least one federal circuit court of appeals has held that a stated present intent to voluntarily cease enforcement, evidenced by the affidavits of local law enforcement officials insisting that they will not enforce the challenged law, will not deprive the court of jurisdiction to hear the challenger's claims. United Food And Commercial Workers Int'l Union v. IBP, Inc., 857 F.2d 422 (8th Cir. 1988) (citing 6A Moore's Federal Practice, paragraph 57.18[2] at 57-189 (2d ed. 1987) and Seattle School District No. 1 v. Washington, 633 F.2d 1338, 1342 n. 1 (9th Cir. 1980), aff'd, 458 U.S. 457 (1982), for the proposition that "[w]here the enforcement of a regulatory statute would cause plaintiff to sustain a direct injury, the action may properly be maintained, whether or not the public officer has 'threatened' suit; the presence of the statute is threat enough, at least where the challenged statute is not moribund").
Other state courts have recently found declaratory-judgment challenges to same-sex sodomy prohibitions to be justiciable even where there was no proof that the laws had been enforced against consenting adults in private or that prosecutors had made literal threats of prosecution. In Gryczan v. State, 283 Mont. 433, 942 P.2d 112 (1997), homosexual respondents sought a declaratory judgment on the constitutionality of Montana's deviate-sexual-conduct statute, which criminalized consensual sex between adults of the same gender. Though the respondents alleged only that they were injured by the mere existence of the statute, the Supreme Court of Montana held that the case presented a justiciable controversy. Id. In Campbell v. Sundquist, 926 S.W.2d 250 (Tenn. Ct. App. 1996), homosexual plaintiffi brought a declaratory judgment action seeking a declaration that Tennessee's Homosexual Practices Act violated the Tennessee Constitution. The Court of Appeals of Tennessee held that the plaintiffs had standing and were entitled to maintain an action even though none of them had been prosecuted under the statute. Id.
