It's legal!
The Supreme Court has struck down Texas's anti-sodomy laws in a ruling which appears, in fact, to invalidate all anti-sodomy laws in the US, and about jolly time, too. The vote was 6-3, with, as you might expect, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas dissenting. For a good look at just how creepy these three are, the AP reports Scalia as saying that the Supreme Court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," while Clarence Thomas believes in a strict interpretation of the Constitution and therefore finds that Americans have no right to privacy. Read the opinion here, delivered by Kennedy. Quite a good opening:
Liberty protects the person from unwarranted govern- ment intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a domi- nant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes free- dom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.
Perhaps, if Clarence Thomas can still claim Americans have no right to privacy, we ought to legislate one...Given programmes like Total Information Awareness and Ashcroft's PATRIOT Act, the sheer quantity of sensitive information on our citizenry held in various databases, encryption issues, RIAA lawsuits, Orrin Hatch's desire to blow up my computer, and so forth, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a certain freedom from physical or virtual intrusion might not be a bad idea.
ASIDE: How dreadful a job have the US forces done securing Iraq's nuclear materials? Greenpeace has been rounding up and returning looted radioactives for them. This story is confirmed by the Guardian:
A team from Greenpeace handed American troops a large, abandoned canister of "yellow cake" - low-enriched uranium powder used as raw material for radioactive fuel.
Perhaps George Bush's theme song ought to be 'The Sun is Burning'...
Posted by aloysius at June 26, 2003 01:40 PM | TrackBack |