Alito writing backed privacy, gay rights
By Christian R. Burset and Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Correspondents
November 2, 2005
boston.com
PRINCETON, N.J. -- As a senior at Princeton University, Samuel A. Alito Jr. chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden."
The report, issued in 1971 by Alito and 16 other Princeton students, stemmed from a class assignment to study the ''boundaries of privacy in American society" and to recommend ways to protect individual rights.
The far-ranging report, which satisfied a requirement for public policy students and which was stored in the university's Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, provided a glimpse of a more liberal Alito than the jurist is now perceived.
''We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America," Alito wrote in a foreword to the report, in 1971. ''We all believe that privacy is too often sacrificed to other values; we all believe that the threat to privacy is steadily and rapidly mounting; we all believe that action must be taken on many fronts now to preserve privacy."
A classmate, Jeffrey G. Weil, said yesterday that Alito, one of the top seniors in his class, had been selected to advise juniors writing the report, coaching them through the research and then writing an introduction explaining their recommendations.
Alito was ''not a person who has an agenda in terms of changing the world," said Weil, who is now a lawyer in Philadelphia. His role was mostly advisory, said Weil, who wrote the section of the report dealing with gay rights but who said he could not remember whether Alito personally agreed with the recommendations.
The Supreme Court did not strike down laws prohibiting gay sex until the Lawrence v. Texas case in 2003. Many social conservatives have criticized that decision.
As a judge, Alito has not ruled on any major gay rights cases. Richard H. Fallon, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that it would be a mistake to read too much into ''little bits of evidence like this" and that even if Alito held socially liberal views on gay rights, it would not necessarily mean that he would vote in favor of gay marriage or any other issue.
''From the fact that someone thinks legislators ought to forbid discrimination," he said, ''it does not follow that the person would necessarily think that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to hold that the Constitution forbids discrimination against gays."
Indeed, the 1971 report rarely commented on what action the judiciary should take, focusing mostly in legislative action. The report covered what its undergraduate authors saw as increasing threats to privacy in the late 1960s, questioning whether the ''cybernetic revolution" would result in more invasions of privacy and criticizing government surveillance of ''mild dissenters on the war in Vietnam."
Alito, who would probably rule on many privacy issues arising from the Bush administration's pursuit of the war on terror, wrote in his 1971 introduction: ''We are convinced that in recent years government has often used improper means to gather information about individuals who posed no threat either to their government or to their fellow citizens."
At the end Alito wrote: ''The erosion of privacy, unlike war, economic bad times, or domestic unrest, does not jump to the citizen's attention . . . But by the time privacy is seriously compromised, it is too late to clamor for reform."
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