I had forgotten Andrew Sullivan's blog but was led back to it via reading some other bloggers just now. Interesting to read him on this topic as opposed to reading him on Iraq. He is trying to carve out some distinction for O'Connor's approach as contrasted with Kennedy's. And yet use just as sweeping a judgment as Kennedy does. Will be interesting to watch.
His view, I'm surprised, is much as my own. Lawrence is a protection of minority rights against democratic majorities.
andrewsullivan.com
A RUSH AGAINST UNDERSTANDING: And, yes, this is tampering with the Constitution. What SCOTUS just did was apply settled principles in Constitutional law to a class of persons previously vulnerable to majority whim and privacy violation. That's called applying the constitution, not tampering with it or changing its text. The difference with the past can be seen in the difference between Sandra Day O'Connor's argument and Antonin Scalia's. O'Connor sees gay people as fully-fledged people, with lives and loves and needs like everyone else. Scalia sees them as people who for some bizarre reason do immoral things with their body parts. O'Connor sees that homosexuality is what people are. Scalia thinks that homosexuality is what some people do. Once you accept O'Connor's premise, Lawrence is not tampering with the Constitution, it's applying it, given what we now know about sexual orientation. If you accept Scalia's premise, you can see why he thinks the door is now open to raping children and marrying German Shepherds. The reason I support O'Connor, at a very basic level, is that I know she's right. I know as well as I know anything, that being gay is an integral part of someone's being, not some facile choice but a complex and profound human identity - equal in all its facets to the heterosexual human identity. So for me, the issue is clear: the equal dignity of citizens and human beings. That's why I feel so strongly about this - as do so many others. |
