Santorum is not a leader
We need party leaders who are right and who also are smooth enough to sell our ideas to the mainstream.
We need people like President Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, people who can articulate our positions to all of America, and people who know when to shut up.
So9
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
1. This Court should dismiss the writ as improvidently granted. The minuscule record in this case establishes virtually nothing beyond the fact that petitioners committed anal same-sex sodomy. For all the record reflects, the sodomy could have been nonconsensual, or public, or paid for, or incestuous, or part of an anonymous "one-night stand" arranged through an online chat room. The record does not even indicate whether either participant could fairly be described as homosexual in orientation. This case is therefore unsuitable for the landmark adjudication petitioners seek. All that is properly before the Court is a purely facial challenge to the classification, and prohibition, of certain extramarital deviant sexual acts. There is not even a record upon which to make either an informed judgment about such acts (for due process purposes) or an informed comparison between the acts within and without the scope of the challenged Texas statute (for equal protection purposes).
2. This Court should affirm the judgment rejecting petitioners' claim of a fundamental right to engage in same-sex sodomy. This Court has never recognized a fundamental right to engage in extramarital acts of sexual gratification, much less a right to sexual gratification unconnected to marriage or procreation. To reach such a result in this case would require not only the overruling of Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986), but also the invalidation of fornication laws (as petitioners admit) and a host of other laws defining sex offenses. This Court has repeatedly cautioned against the expansion of substantive due process, and no such expansion is warranted here. This case presents only a facial challenge, and the Texas sodomy statute clearly may be constitutionally applied in a broad range of circumstances, e. g., to coercive acts, to prostitution, to public acts of sodomy, etc. (For all the record shows, such circumstances may well have applied here.) Hence, petitioners' facial challenge must fail.
3. This Court should affirm the judgment rejecting petitioners' equal protection claim. This case has been litigated under the rational basis standard; hence, as this Court explained in Heller v. Doe, 509 U. S. 312, 319 (1993), it would be wholly improper and unfair to inject a new standard here. Moreover, because there is no fundamental right at issue and because the record does not even identify what supposed suspect or quasi-suspect class petitioners belong to, heightened scrutiny is in any event unjustified. Under rational scrutiny, the ban on same-sex sodomy clearly passes constitutional muster. There are at least three, independently adequate, rational bases for the statute. First, a ban on same-sex sodomy permissibly furthers public morality. Second, the extensively documented health risks of same-sex sodomy supply a strong public health rationale for the statute. Third, based upon the view of all nine Justices in Bowers, as well as this Court's other "privacy" decisions, a state could reasonably conclude that, to minimize the likelihood of constitutional attack and invalidity, a ban on sodomy needed to exclude heterosexual acts. Importantly, the distinction between heterosexual and homosexual unions is the hallmark of marriage law. To invalidate that distinction here would be tantamount to holding marriage unconstitutional.
II. PETITIONERS' SUBSTANTIVE DUE PROCESS CHALLENGE FAILS.
This Court has never recognized a federal constitutional right to engage in extramarital sexual acts --even the consensual, nonmercenary, private acts of adults, much less sexual acts that deviate from the normal sexual union of a man and a woman. Carey v. Population Servs. Int'l, 431 U. S. 678, 688 n. 5 (1977) (" the Court has not definitively answered the difficult question whether and to what extent the Constitution prohibits state 7 statutes regulating private consensual behavior among adults . . . and we do not purport to answer that question now") (citations, editing marks, and internal quotation marks omitted). Creation of such a novel right would require precisely the sort of ahistorical, atextual, freewheeling substantive due process adjudication which this Court has renounced for the past thirty years. See, e. g., Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U. S. 702, 720- 22 (1997); Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 302-03 (1993); Collins v. City of Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 125 (1992); Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U. S. 110, 121-23 (1989) (plurality); Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186, 194-95 (1986). As Justice Stevens wrote for a unanimous Court, As a general matter, the Court has always been reluctant to expand the concept of substantive due process because guideposts for responsible decisionmaking in this unchartered area are scarce and open-ended. . . . The doctrine of judicial self-restraint requires us to exercise the utmost care whenever we are asked to break new ground in this field. Collins, 503 U. S. at 125 (citation omitted). Petitioners rely heavily upon this Court's abortion and birth control jurisprudence. E. g., Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992). Casey, however, relied heavily upon stare decisis in declining to overrule in toto the line of cases beginning with Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973). See Casey, 505 U. S. at 854-69. In the present case, existing precedent --Bowers --weighs against recognition of the proposed right; hence the stare decisis rationale of Casey, regardless of its merits, 9 gives no support to petitioners.
The way of the Left is exactly as you say -- to circumvent the democratic legislative process through which they surely lose, by going back door (no pun intended) via the nine SC justices.
A conclusion that is devoutly to be wished, by anyone who genuinely respects individual liberty ... and that is already recognized by the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments ... and that is exceedingly, and unfortunately, unlikely.
In any event, the removal of such differentiation under the law is akin to outlawing Jim Crow restrictions as to race, not "creating a protected class." It involves a restriction that is placed upon one class of persons being removed, not a privilege that is granted to such a class.
What this does as to federalism is indeed problematic -- but we have the Fourteenth Amendment, and an entirely reasonable case can be (and has been) made that setting up penalties for one class of people as to consensual acts is not "due process of law."
If he doesn't, then he needs to explain himself.
If he does, then he will suffer the political fallout and hurt the Republican party in general.
"2) Does it violate the 14th amendment's guarantee of equal protection to outlaw homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy, as the Texas law does? In other words, should sexual orientation become a specially protected category under the 14th amendment--along with race? Again, the petitioners say yes."
You have this backwards. To say that homosexuals do not have the same right as heterosexuals in fact removes the right to equal protection under the law for a targeted category of citizens.
Sorry, but even The Onion couldn't have made that case name up...lol!
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the FOUNDING FATHERS UNLEASHED |
Our Constitution provides the legitimate foundations of this country as a free nation that is of the people and by the people but, we must read beyond it words and read it's authors words and thoughts in order to understand the warnings they have sent through generations to it's application in todays world. | |
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warning... "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion...Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." warning... "Have you ever found in history, one single example of a Nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterwards restored to virtue?... And without virtue, there can be no political liberty....Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?..." |
The entire argument about sexual behavior is so simple it can be reduced to the following: Should there be any social rules about what sexual activity a human being engages in?
If the answer is no then everyone should just shut up...hetero is okay, cousins are okay, polygamy is okay, bi is okay; gay is okay, 13-year olds are okay, and one or one-hundred-at-a-time are okay, et. al.
However, if a society decides that certain rules about who does whom when and where is functional and perhaps even necessary, all that is left is to decide is WHAT are the rules of sexual behavior and WHO shall make them...simple. Those who follow the 'rules' are then NORMAL and all the rest are PERVERTS... so very, very simple...you decide.
Van & Katherine Jenerette
Call me any names imaginable but Santorum is right in his statement, both legally and morally. The demokrats have no morals left, of their complete and utter leftness.
April 27, 2003
To the Editor
Seattle Times,
Leonard Pitts Jr. was shocked that Sen. Rick Santorum would compare homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery and bestiality. (‘The repugnant cynicism of Sen. Rick Santorum’ 4-27-03,Seattle Times)
I was too. While heterosexual bigamy, polygamy, and adultery are harmful and, I think, morally wrong, they are not sexual perversions. Homosexuality is. There is no comparison.
Mr. Pitts goes on to argue that just because Sen. Santorum may be an “all-right guy” or have friends and family who love him doesn’t mean that whatever he say’s or does is all right. I agree. Whether or not somebody is loved or whether or not they are “nice” should not be the litmus test for whether or not an action or a behavior they engage in is good, right or appropriate.
Yet, that’s exactly the line that homosexualists take in their efforts to normalize homosexual behavior. Don’t pay attention to the sexual act they engage in, even though, as Mr. Pitts rightfully states, to do so would be “to separate one’s identity from the behavior that defines it”, just pay attention to whether or not they are nice, a good employee or have someone who loves them.
This may come as a shock to you but pedophiles have people who love them too. Sexual perversions don’t become normal behavior just because the person who engages in it is nice or loved or witty. Just because they are someone’s mother, father, sister or brother.
Homosexualists have largely succeeded, primarily through bullying tactics, (Bigot! Homophobe! Hater!) at getting otherwise intelligent people to deny the obvious biology of heterosexuality, to suppress their natural revulsion to homosexual acts and to ignore the physical/mental harm caused by engaging in homosexual acts.
If a group of people had a desire to eat food by putting it in their ear instead of their mouth would they be able to convince Mr. Pitts that it was natural, normal and healthy? Probably.