This ruling only says that it is none of government's business what grownups do.Public "morality" (as opposed to "morality" in public places) is absolutely positively none of the government's business in a free society. As for "public health", that's the dodge the nanny state liberals would use to ban tobacco, "unhealthy" foods, "unsafe" hobbies, and probably alcohol if they thought they could get away with it.Yeah. None of the state's business when they get together in gay bath-houses and engage in unprotected sex and then get the AIDS virus and then go on public assistance and use their insurance coverage to pay for the cost--which you pay for too. Yeah, public health and public morality are none of the state's business.
-Eric
Actually, yes it is. I love how you libertarians talk about 'honoring the Constitution' and 'going back to original Constitutional principles'. If you actually cared about that or knew anything about 'original Constitutional principles' you'd know that the federal government has only enumerated powers, whereas the states themselves are governments of general jurisdiction. Under the 'original understanding' of the Constitution, the Feds prohibited the states from doing only certain things (entering into treaties, granting letters of marque and reprisal, passing bills of attainder, and so on (cf. Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution). The states could regulate whatever was not explicitly or implicitly proscribed for them to do by the Constitution.
The Federal government, again, under the 'original Constitutional principles' you libertarians so love, is a government of enumerated and delegated powers. Unless prohibited by either express or implied Constitutional limitation, states can (or I should say, could) do whatever they wish to uphold the public order and the common good.
By striking down this law, the SCOTUS has merely reaffirmed the half-century drift towards making the Federal government a government of general jurisdiction, not of enumerated and delegated powers. Of course, libertarians are cheering, because they only care about states' rights when it's advantageous to invoke them in favor of pot, porn, or their friends the Gluteus Masochists.