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What's also depressing is that bright and knowledgeable people will seriously argue that a right does not exist if it doesn't appear in the Bill of Rights. Then no one will answer what the 9th Amendment covers when I ask. Nor do they seem to recall much of what Hamilton and other said about the BoR not being meant to grant ANY government the authority to intrude on certain areas of life.

We had one praising Scalia's dissent in the Griswold case, which was a law prohibiting(or was it merely regulating) the use of contraception between a married man and his wife. And CONSERVATIVES will support these kinds of laws, simply because one group of idiots elects another?

Way to go defenders of liberty! lol

"...What's also depressing is that bright and knowledgeable people will seriously argue that a right does not exist if it doesn't appear in the Bill of Rights. Then no one will answer what the 9th Amendment covers when I ask. Nor do they seem to recall much of what Hamilton and other said about the BoR not being meant to grant ANY government the authority to intrude on certain areas of life...."

The Ninth Amendment protects the people and the states from the Federal government. In other words, the Federal government can't deny the people and the states of rights that they have. It in no way gives the Supreme Court the power to invent a right and then impose it on the states and the people.

If that power exists, if must be held in the penumbra of some other Amendment.

"...We had one praising Scalia's dissent in the Griswold case, which was a law prohibiting(or was it merely regulating) the use of contraception between a married man and his wife. And CONSERVATIVES will support these kinds of laws, simply because one group of idiots elects another?

Way to go defenders of liberty! lol..."

You seem to be confusing conservatives and libertarians. Conservatives have a profound respect for tradition and are skeptical of those who would have us abandon it. Granted, some are extreme or intemperate in these views. Criticize them appropriately for their extremism. Do not fault them for their respect for tradition.

Libertarians may have respect for tradition (the Lew Rockwell crowd comes to mind), but they value absolute personal freedom to a greater extent. Clearly, you are a libertarian. Fine.

Please do not criticize conservatives for not being libertarians. The two terms are not synonymous.

Of course not. They'd have to admit it covers all private, peaceful activity that does not initiate force or fraud against another and thus violate the equal rights of others.

Many also don't see how the 9th an 10th work together:

Amendment IX.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Clearly, this says that the rights people possess are not just what is stated in the BoR. Of course that true. Jefferson and Hamilton, and others, were afraid people would think that only rights listed in 1-8 were actual rights. Their fears were founded in the regonition of human nature and were correct.

Amendment X.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Some people read this and think its talking about rights. Its not. Its about powers. And as you correctly stated earlier, there are some issues that no level of government can be given the power to make decisions on. People actually have limited "powers" as powers are what are given to government. People retain ALL rights. The power to protect those rights is partially given to government. I say partially because obviously every individual has the right to self-defense.

This is the way I look at it. Righst exist exclusive of government. Governments eitehr choose to recognize the rights, or they choose not to. Regardless of laws or edicts, the rights still exist.

Skywalk, the ninth amendment doesn't grant any federally enforceable rights whatsoever.

There was some concern during the debate over the Bill of Rights about subjects that were not addressed. The Bill of Rights was designed to guarantee that the federal government could not restrict our rights, and several rights were specifically listed (free speech, freedom of assembly, etc.). There was worry that the federal government might assume that they could restrict rights not listed, by claiming that they were only banned from restricting those rights actually cited in the Bill of Rights' text.

The ninth amendment was drafted to solve that problem. It says that the enumeration of certain rights does not deny the existence of other rights retained by the people. However, note that the language is negative. It says the government (which meant the federal government, as the Bill of Rights was never intended to apply to the states at all) can't DENY the existence of other rights, whatever they may be. But it in no way grants the federal government the power to determine what those rights are, and to impose them on the states. Those rights are left to the voters and the state governments they elect for hashing out in the political process.

This is why it took constitutional amendments to ban slavery and give women federally guaranteed voting rights. Justice John Marshall couldn't "interpret" the ninth amendment as guaranteeing a right not to be enslaved. Nor could Justice Holmes decades later find a "right of women to vote" in the ninth amendment. They couldn't do that because there is no, as in ZERO, federal judicial power in the ninth amendment vis a vis the states. The whole purpose of the amendment was to keep the federal government, including the courts, out of the states on any matter where the Constitution was silent.

It required the feds to respect, for example, both Wyoming's law granting women the vote, and New York's law denying them the vote. If you didn't like one of those laws, your options were to change the law within the state in question, or get two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of the states to amend the Constitution. The suffragettes did both, working state by state, and also working toward the 19th amendment, which eventually passed.

"Liberal" activist judges, however, have taken it upon themselves on abortion, sodomy, and many other issues to simply declare that they "found" a right to do those things hidden somewhere in some vague privacy concept, or whatever, and are using raw judicial power to impose their agenda on the country.

And, by the way, I've seen a few posts claiming that this "privacy rights" stuff can be used to overturn IRS regulations or gun laws. Not a chance in the world of that happening, because the judges only strike down laws they disagree with under this concept. It isn't a principle that's applied across the board. It's the whim of the judges. And the judges who created this "privacy right" are lefties who adore the IRS and love gun control, so "privacy" will never be invoked against them. It will only be invoked against traditional morality since legal sodomy and abortion actually cause government to expand, as I've mentioned elsewhere.