Alito backed privacy, gay rights-(young Alito issued rousing defense of privacy and gay rights)

WASHINGTON – In college, Samuel Alito led a student conference that urged legalization of sodomy and curbs on domestic intelligence, a sweeping defense of privacy rights he said were under threat by the government and the dawning computer age.

President Bush's choice for the Supreme Court, in a report written years before ubiquitous personal computers made electronic privacy the everyday concern it is now, warned of the potential for abuses by officials and companies collecting data on individuals.

Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden." Alito also called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring.

As a federal appellate judge, Alito has built a scant record on gay-rights issues and a mixed one, at best, on privacy matters generally, in the view of civil liberties advocates who are still examining his opinions.

But they saw in the 1971 report a prescient thinker taking on issues ahead of their time, including the need for computer encryption, stronger oversight of domestic intelligence and curbs on the surveillance powers of states.

"The document itself is amazing," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It is a dramatic statement in support of the right of privacy.

"Nonetheless," Rotenberg went on, "his decisions as an appellate judge over the last 15 years do raise some significant concerns about his willingness to apply Fourth Amendment privacy standards." Rotenberg cited an example in which Alito appeared to support the strip search of two people involved in an authorized search but not named in a warrant.

The Human Rights Campaign, which advocates gay rights, said the report gives senators the basis to question Alito on that subject and privacy matters broadly in his confirmation hearings.

"If these are his views today – and there is no indication they are not – it's a hopeful sign that may provide some insight into his philosophy," said David Smith, the group's policy vice president. "This isn't pop-the-champagne-cork time. His views need to be explored."

Even so, Smith was struck that Alito's report would raise a subject few tackled back then, and come down so unequivocally on it. "Very few people were standing up for gay Americans 34 years ago," he said.

Harriet Miers, whose withdrawal from contention led to Alito's nomination, had gone on record in 1989 as favoring equal civil rights for gays but opposing repeal of the Texas anti-sodomy law, since overturned by the Supreme Court. Smith said that in comparison with Miers' known views on gay rights, "Alito wins and it isn't by a nose."

Alito is listed on the paper as the chairman of the conference, entitled the Boundaries of Privacy in American Society, and author of the report's seven-page summary of findings. It was done for Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Alito was a senior acting as a "commissioner" for the undergraduates in his group.

Mark Dwyer, a college roommate of Alito's, said such class projects were typically "one of those academic exercises of 'let's pretend in the real world.'"

Rotenberg said the report sounds much like one produced later by a national committee drawn together by that era's Health, Education and Welfare Department. Recommendations in that report became the basis of the landmark 1974 Privacy Act.

In it, the young Alito writes that the Census Bureau should be barred from asking unnecessarily intrusive questions, federal privacy ombudsmen should be appointed and the government should face strict conditions for keeping and distributing dossiers on citizens.

Much as privacy-savvy Web sites today promise not to disseminate personally identifiable information, Alito said the government should limit its use of information on individuals to "bulk statistics."

"The cybernetic revolution has greatly magnified the threat to privacy today," he said.

In one recommendation that was commonly debated at the time but a nonstarter today, he said all computer systems should be licensed by the federal government.

The report, two years before Roe v. Wade affirmed a constitutional right to abortion, does not address that subject. Abortion-rights supporters consider that right to be a fundamental matter of privacy.

As an appeals court judge, he held that states can require women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. The Supreme Court disagreed.

Also on the bench, Alito supported a high school student who was taunted because he was perceived as gay, and a family seeking to adopt an HIV-positive child. The adoption had been challenged on grounds that the child posed a medical threat to the family's other child.

Alito also, however, wrote the majority opinion in a 1999 decision overturning a school district's wide-ranging anti-harassment policy, ruling in favor of Christian students who wanted to preach against homosexuality.

EDITOR'S NOTE – Associated Press writer Rosa Cirianni in Princeton, N.J., contributed to this report.

On abortion, a nuanced stand

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1102/p01s04-usju.html

In 3 of 4 cases, Supreme Court nominee Alito voted on the side of abortion rights.

By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – If there was any doubt about where US Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito stands on abortion, his 90-year-old mother quickly and decisively put that question to rest.

"Of course he's against abortion," Rose Alito told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from her Hamilton, N.J., home.

Her candid statement may go down in history as the most blunt and honest admission of a Supreme Court nominee's view on the hot-button issue.

But the true test of appeals court judges isn't which personal views they hold, but to what extent those personal views may influence how they rule in a particular case.

On this issue, legal analysts disagree in their assessments of Judge Alito. Some say he is a conservative ideologue. Others say he is a smart, careful jurist who leaves personal views behind when he dons his black robes.

The best evidence of his work as a judge are his published opinions. They contain a few surprises and some ammunition - for both the left and the right.

For example, of the four abortion cases in which he participated as an appeals court judge, he voted on the pro-choice side in all but one. A 1995 Alito vote striking down a Pennsylvania abortion restriction in particular is raising eyebrows among some legal scholars.

"That [1995 case] strongly seems to indicate that Alito is not a policy-driven true-believer who's used every possible opportunity to advance one side's preferred outcome, but instead a judge who has indeed come down on both sides, in different cases," says David Garrow, a constitutional historian and expert in reproductive rights cases at the high court.

Senate investigators, legal scholars, and special interest group lawyers are poring over Judge Alito's opinions written during 15-years of work on the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals. They are looking for clues of what kind of justice Alito might become if confirmed to a life-tenure post on the nation's highest court.

How he may rule in abortion cases is particularly relevant to the inquiry since President Bush has named him to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a key swing voter and defender of abortion rights.

If Alito holds a different view on that issue, his vote could shift the balance of power on the court. His four abortion cases include:

• A 1991 challenge to a Pennsylvania law requiring married women to notify their husbands before seeking an abortion. The court struck down the restriction. Alito dissented.

• A 1995 challenge to a Pennsylvania law that required women seeking to use Medicaid funds to abort a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest to report the incident to law enforcement officials and identify the offender. Alito provided the decisive vote striking down the abortion restriction.

• A 1997 challenge to a New Jersey law that prevents parents from suing for damages on behalf of the wrongful death of a fetus. Alito ruled that the Constitution does not afford protection to the unborn.

• A 2000 challenge to New Jersey's ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. Alito struck down the law based on a recent Supreme Court decision.

Analysts are divided over the meaning of Alito's votes and his various writings while on the bench.

"I don't think these cases tell us anything about whether he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade or not," says James Bopp, general counsel for National Right to Life. "Nor do they tell us whether he supports pro-life as a value."

But Mr. Bopp says examining Alito's approach to deciding cases can reveal what kind of justice he might become. "In these cases he didn't go beyond the issues that needed to be resolved," he says. "He wasn't trying to create law. He was just carefully following the existing law."

Bopp says Alito's style of judging is likely to carry over to his work on the high court. "He's not a rookie. He's been doing this for 15 years," he says. "That usually doesn't change. He will do the same thing as a justice."

The Alito case receiving the most attention is his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In his 15-page dissent, Alito said that while the provision might impose some limitation on a woman's ability to obtain an abortion it was not so severe as to rise to the level of an "undue burden."

The judge based that conclusion on his study of Justice O'Connor's writings on the issue.

Alito's dissent says that the potential implications on women in abusive relationships were "a matter of grave concern" to him.

But he added that it was for state lawmakers, not judges, to decide the wisdom of such measures. "Whether the legislature's approach represents sound public policy is not a question for us to decide," he wrote. "Our task here is simply to decide whether [the abortion law] meets constitutional standards."

The US Supreme Court took up the case the following year and used the case to broaden the "undue burden" standard, in a way that rejected Alito's analysis.

But his work was not totally cast aside. Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist embraced and quoted the Alito dissent in his own dissent, which was joined by three other members of the court.

Critics say Alito's dissent suggests he is not sensitive enough to the concerns of women. They see it as an example of his personal views on abortion influencing his approach to the law.

Supporters say he made an honest effort to identify and apply O'Connor's "undue burden" standard as it existed at the time.

In the 1995 Medicaid case, Alito cast the deciding vote striking down a Pennsylvania abortion restriction. Analysts say it was a close legal question and Alito could have decided the case either way.

"If he has antiabortion philosophical leanings he did not let that warp his judgment in the case," says Seth Kreimer, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and co-counsel on the winning side in the 1995 case. "But there are a lot more degrees of freedom at the Supreme Court level than at the court of appeals."

>>
Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden."
<<

Putting aside how any tax on income allows the government to destroy and sweep aside any finacial privacy, an aspect of privacy that the left in particular doesn't seem to care about, it is absurd do suggest any federal nexus for consenting acts in private. It is not a matter that of forbidding or not forbidding as there simply is no federal interest that anyone can honestly support.

This is not to say that people can consent to and commit mutual acts that would offend morality, or violate the teachings of the Bible. Many people do. However, this is a government of laws and not theological opinions.

This raises a very important issue for any civilization: to what extent should vices be made into crimes? If it costs $30,000 per year to keep a person in jail, not to mention destroying his ability to return to a normal life and a normal (tax-paying) job afterwards, what acts are worth making into crimes and what acts are not worth worrying about?

To that end, I would recommend the classic essay on that very issue written in 1875 by Lysander Spooner, Vices Are Not Crimes, A Vindication of Moral Liberty

see: http://www.crispinsartwell.com/spooner.htm

Ok, lets look at this one by one.

"Three decades before the Supreme Court decriminalized gay sex, Alito declared on behalf of his group of fellow Princeton students that "no private sexual act between consenting adults should be forbidden." Alito also called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in hiring."

Fine with me. I believe in limited government especially when it comes to intruding into citizens personal life. Gays have the same constituional rights as anyone in this country.

"Rotenberg cited an example in which Alito appeared to support the strip search of two people involved in an authorized search but not named in a warrant."

Would need to know more detail on this one.

"Very few people were standing up for gay Americans 34 years ago," he said.

This shows Alito has guts to go against the tide. This does not mean he is in favor of the gay agenda, it just means he believe they have the same constituional rights as anyone else.

"In it, the young Alito writes that the Census Bureau should be barred from asking unnecessarily intrusive questions, federal privacy ombudsmen should be appointed and the government should face strict conditions for keeping and distributing dossiers on citizens. "

Right on Alito, keep the government at bay.

"Much as privacy-savvy Web sites today promise not to disseminate personally identifiable information, Alito said the government should limit its use of information on individuals to "bulk statistics."

Good.

"As an appeals court judge, he held that states can require women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. The Supreme Court disagreed."

Right on Alito, that one is a no brainer.

"Also on the bench, Alito supported a high school student who was taunted because he was perceived as gay, and a family seeking to adopt an HIV-positive child. The adoption had been challenged on grounds that the child posed a medical threat to the family's other child."

Bullies are jerks, the kid deserved protection from such creeps, regardless of his sexual orientation. Alito was right on that one. Regarding the hiv child, the threat of passing the virus to the other child is almost non existent. They would have had to exchange blood somehow. Possible but...I think Alito was right on that one too.

"Alito also, however, wrote the majority opinion in a 1999 decision overturning a school district's wide-ranging anti-harassment policy, ruling in favor of Christian students who wanted to preach against homosexuality."

Alito right once again, and consistent with a strong human rights value system.

Alito for SCOTUS!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.