Posted on 06/30/2003 5:59:18 AM PDT by madprof98
In a recent public appearance, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the man proposed by many to become our next chief justice, uttered words that ought to send a chill down the back of every liberty-loving American.
"The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia told an audience at John Carroll University on March 18. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."
Scalia is a Harvard-trained lawyer with a keen intellect and an excellent command of the language. It seems fair to assume that he meant exactly what he said.
He did not call into question a few of our rights, or some of our rights, but most of our rights.
And these rights -- or what we naive citizens wrongly presume to be our rights -- do not go slightly beyond constitutional requirements, but according to Scalia go "way beyond what the Constitution requires." In other words, most of the rights that you and I believe we enjoy under the protection of the U.S. Constitution could be greatly reduced under a Scalia-dominated Supreme Court, and he would never utter a peep of protest.
In those March remarks, Scalia did not identify particular rights he had in mind. But in his dissent to last week's 6-3 Supreme Court decision on gay rights, he got a little more specific. In essence, he wrote that Americans do not have a right to privacy. The long arm and peeping eye of government can extend even into our own bedrooms as far as he's concerned.
Fortunately, like Scalia, the Founding Fathers also respected the power of words. They too were precise in their use of language. And in the Ninth Amendment, they state explicitly that "the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Among those "rights retained by the people," the right to privacy -- the right to be left alone -- is surely fundamental to the American understanding of the proper relationship between citizen and government. And if that right has any meaning whatsoever, surely it extends to consenting adults engaging in the most private of human activities, which is sex.
The majority of the court agreed with that conclusion. It threw out a Texas law that made gay sex a criminal matter, stating that "the Texas statute furthers no legitimate state interest which can justify its intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual."
Scalia, of course, disagreed. He rejected the contention that there is a constitutional right to privacy. He wrote that disapproval of gay sex by the majority is enough to make it a legitimate state interest. The Texas law, he says, does not discriminate against gay Americans because "men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, are all subject to its prohibition of deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex."
That's like saying you can pass a law against being Jewish because that law applies to everyone, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or atheist.
Like many of those who criticized the court's ruling, Scalia also claimed that "this effectively ends all morals legislation."
Which is nonsense.
Moral codes can and in fact must be legislated when the behavior in question harms another party. That harm makes the behavior a legitimate state interest. Child sexual abuse and child pornography, for example, clearly meet that test.
But what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home is not even a legitimate interest of their neighbors, much less of the state.
In his conclusion, Scalia accused the court of "tak[ing] sides in the culture wars, departing from its role of assuring, as a neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed."
That's telling language. If we are indeed engaged in a culture war, Scalia's side is losing and he knows it. In his desperation, he and others wish to enlist the power of government as a weapon to repress a minority he despises.
But to paraphrase, that goes well beyond what the Constitution allows.
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Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.
I don't know what country you idiots are living in, but sounds NOTHING like the country the Founders wrote about.
Never did a law against sodomy harm anyone, whereas homosexual sodomy has killed over 500,000 American men. Forget the arsenic cocktails, Dr. Kevorkian; just prescribe sodomy to your patients, in the privacy of their own homes of course.
This idiot has it completely backwards. Scalia's comment appears to be a direct reference to natural rights, which are held to exist independently of the Constitution. Under such an interpretation, Scalia would be more likely to defend natural rights than a Souter or Ginsburg.
What ticks off this lib, though, is that natural rights don't include the invented rights the political left demand that the courts enforce in a extra-legislative fashion. the "right to privacy" has nothing to do with actual privacy, but instead is the assertion that two or more people can contract with each other to do anything, even if it is illegal. That "right" is not a natural right.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It doesn't say that a right to be secure... is hereby granted. It says since we have these rights to personal security and they are given to us by God, they shall not be violated-- it's an affirmation, not a declaration of something new.
You are correct. The Constitution constrains government power, not individual rights. It is pretty clear from historical evidence that the Founders in no way wished to suggest that individual rights were solely limited to what was presented in the Bill of Rights. That was, in fact, one of the arguments against the BOR -- that people would think that anything not mentioned in it was not, in fact, a right.
Seriously though, Force, Fraud, Theft. Anything else is illogical and morally questionable.
Provide evidence that one sex offender has been released from prison based upon the SCOTUS decision.
Only in that the original Constitution made explicit reference to slaves (sometimes as "other persons").
I will agee with you that it is assumed, but I would be a lot happier if it was spelled out so no one could mess with it.
So9
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