Does that mean to enshrine criminal punishment for consensual sexual behavior behind close doors? And have that punishment apply to homosexuals, but not heterosexuals?
I like what FReeper Southack has to say:
Per the title for this thread, *why* should Conservatives despair?
The Supreme Court just ruled that *government* doesn't have the Constitutional authority to ban, tax, or regulate certain activities inside our private bedrooms.
Isn't that what Conservatives want: more restrictions on *government* authority?
Frankly, leftists can cheer and conservatives can jeer or despair, but I'd call this ruling a stealth victory for reigning in the power and scope of the federal government.
The precedent set in this case could *easily* be applied to a number of other areas in which government should be prohibited from regulating.
How can the government justify regulating my love of guns in my bedroom now, for instance?!
15 posted on 06/26/2003 8:02 PM CDT by Southack (Media bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. See ante, at 11 (noting "an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex" (emphasis added)). The impossibility of distinguish-ing homosexuality from other traditional "morals" offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis chal-lenge. "The law," it said, "is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed."
What a massive disruption of the current social order, therefore, the overruling of Bowers entails.
I turn now to the ground on which the Court squarely rests its holding: the contention that there is no rational basis for the law here under attack. This proposition is so out of accord with our jurisprudence—indeed, with the jurisprudence of any society we know—that it requires little discussion.
The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are "immoral and unacceptable," Bowers, supra, at 196—the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornica-tion, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and ob-scenity.
Bowers held that this was a legitimate state interest. The Court today reaches the opposite conclusion. .. The Court embraces instead JUSTICE STEVENS’ declaration in his Bowers dissent, that "the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice," ante, at 17. This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation. If, as the Court asserts, the promotion of majoritarian sexual morality is not even a legitimate state interest, none of the above-mentioned laws can survive rational-basis review.
Most so-called conservatives on FR and elsewhere are conservative in name only. Having no knowledge of history, they mistakenly associate the term "conservatve" with the belief that "an harm ye none, do as thou wilt" -- which, of course, is the pagan's creed as well as that of the libertarian. Pagan in function if not in formal belief, most soi-disant conservatives today deny or downplay the Judeo-Christian tradition which they should be defending; instead, they believe that the only gods we need respect are Reason and Liberty -- the gods of revolution. Their political beliefs consist entirely of defending the entirely imaginary "liberty" of the individual to "do what he/she wants as long as no one gets hurt" -- a positon that has precisely nothing to do with the moral and social order the true conservative wishes to protect, and everything to do with furthering the re-paganization of the West.
And, in time, their libertarian utopia will come. The tyranny of nerve-endings that the modern "conservative" movement will enable will in time usher in a state so horrible that even the worst Islamic theocracy will look desirable in comparison. Some warn that we conservatives want a Taliban-like "sex police" to drag people away for commitng homosexual sodomy, but I tell you that the real sex police -- the ones we'll see before long -- will before long be dragging away people who object to homosexual sodomy as 'hate criminals". After all, we can't have people who openly scorn the morés of our brave new world running around loose, comrades!
Bring on the killer asteroid. We deserve it.