[counterpunch]

The 9th Amendment is extremely misunderstood and frequently misrepresented.

All it is saying is that the Rights named by the Constitution are not to the exclusion of any other unnamed right. What it does not say, however, is that such unnamed rights cannot be limited by specific acts of legislation.

These unnamed rights do not have the full protection of the Constitution, nor does their absence from the Constitution automatically nullify them as a right. It is simply saying that we have full rights unless otherwise specifically noted. It merely states that our rights default in the affirmative.

[Sgt_Schultze]

Maybe. But in order to regulate any unenumerated rights, Congress must have specific Article 1 powers to do so. The framers were quite careful in how much power the allocated to the ruling class. The tenth amendment was intended as the safeguard against a reaching legislature.

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.

Those powers are laid out in section 8 of article 1. It is a limited list but there is but there is the catch-all ...To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

So, as long as the laws are in comportment with a legitimate use of Article 1 power, then the federal government would be within its lawful right to regulate an unenumerated right. But it should be required to justify such limitations.

[Durus]

A right does not have to be enumerated to be afforded protection. Even a casual reading of the federalist papers and the debates of the time would demonstrate that. The constitution is (or was) a document that enumerates the powers of government. The government was only supposed to have those powers specifically delegated to them via the constitution but now we have people, claiming to be conservative, that want to turn the constitution on it's head so that people have only those rights specifically enumerated and government has any power except those explicitly denied them. Even the explicit "congress shall make no law" is conveniently ignored by some "conservatives".

Abortion is an important issue but we don't have to gut the concept of individual rights (privacy) and limited government to tackle that issue. Don't be drawn into the Privacy=Abortion premise as it is plainly false.

[Captain Jack Aubrey]

Many of the Founders felt it was unnecessary to list any of the rights of man in the Constitution, since that document's purpose was to set forth a form a government and limit its power to certian specifics. The Constitution adopted by the states contained no Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights was admendments to the Constitution passed by the first Constitutional congress and ratified by the states.

Rights posessed by citizens at the time of the adoption of the Consitution continued after the adoption and after enactment of the Bill of Rights. That is what the 9th Amendment means.

A right to privacy existed prior to the adoption of the Consitution. And it continued afterwards.

The problem with Griswald v. Conn is that the Supreme Court failed to conduct the proper analysis of the privacy right. Instead, it made up a new interpretive model that allowed new rights to be "seen" in pnumbras and emanations. That is just another way of saying the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court says it means, which is tyranny.

A proper examination of the right of privacy would require an understanding of what that right meant in 1787. I suspect that analysis would result in the conclusion that a state legislature could prohibit the sale of contraceptives.

That is why the Supreme Court had to make up a new right of privacy, if the Court was to actually function as a super legislature as it has now been doing for 45 years.