I haven't made my case? I gave you my case exactly before, and the professor from Princeton spelled it out quite nicely. In both cases, you just said - "that's wrong" without supporting YOUR argument. All you have done, John, is make bald, unsupported, assertions of "you're wrong."
My argument is, rather, again to repeat, that he is moving the deck chairs around to make different case law relevant.
And, again to repeat, YOU are wrong. And if you'd have read the opinions of the cases, you'd know you were wrong. The fact that you think there is a seperation between "marriage" cases and "privacy" cases totally gives away that you don't know the first thing about the topic. The whole subject of the presumed Constitutional right to privacy directly relates to marriage. BECAUSE the court has ruled, most notably in Griswold, that the privacy of the sanctity of marriage is a PROTECTED class given constitutional privacy protection, and that's as far as it goes. Griswold also EXPRESSLY notes that such protections do not impinge on the state's legitimate regulation of other sexual conduct:
Justice Goldberg from the Griswold deciding opinion:
Finally, it should be said of the Crout's holding tdoay that it in no way interferes with a State's proper regulation of sexual promiscuity or misconduct. As my Brother Harlan so well states in his dissenting opinion in Poe v. Ullman,
"Adultery, homosexuality and the like are sexual intimacies which the State forbids... but the intimacy of husband and wife is necessarily an essential and accepted feature of the institution of marriage, and institution which the State not only must allow, but which always and in every age it has fostered and protected. It is one thing when the State exerts its power either to forbid extra-marital sexuality...or to say who may marry, but it is quite another when, having acknowledged a marriage and the intimacies inherent in it, it undertakes to regulate by means of the criminal law the details of that intimacy."
Griswold is the relevant privacy case only insofar as it establishes a penumbra that encompasses privacy rights in sexuality FOR MARRIED COUPLES. And affirms that the State has the full perogative to regulate non-marital sexual relations.
The relevant privacy case that's at issue here is Bowers v. Hardwick - the case Santorum paraphrased. Bowers v. Hardwick EXPRESSLY denied a privacy right to homosexual sex.
Justice White:
We first register our disagreement with the Court of Appeals and with respondent that the Court's prior cases have construed the Constitution to confer a right of privacy that extends to homosexual sodomy and for all intents and purposes have decided this case. The reach of this line of cases was sketched in Carey v. Population Services International,...Pierce v. Society of Sisters, ...and Meyer v. Nebraska,...were described as dealing with child rearing and education; Prince v. Massachusetts,.. with family relationships; Skinner v. Oklahoma ex xel. Williamson,... with procreation; Loving v. Virginia,... with marriage; Griswold v Connecticut, supra, and Eisenstadt v. Baird, supra, with contraception; and Roe v. Wade,... with abortion. The latter three cases were interpreted as construing Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to confer a fundamental right to decide whether or not to beget a child...
Accepting the decisions in these cases and the above descriptions of them, we think it evident that none of the rights announced in those cases bears any resemblance to the claimed constitutional right of homosexuals to engage in acts of sodomy that is asserted in this case. No connection between family, marriage, or procreation on the one hand and homosexual activity on the other has been demonstrated, either by the Court of Appeals or by respondent. Moreover, any claim that these cases nevertheless stand for the proposition that any kind of private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable. Indeed, the Court's opinion in Carey twice asserted that the privacy right, which the Griswold line of cases found to be one of the protections provided by the Due Process Clause, did not reach so far...
The Court most importantly REJECTED a privacy right based on the Stanley v. Georgia extended to protect proscribed sexual activities in the home, and wrote those very troublesome words paraphrased by Rick Santorum:
Stanley did protect conduct that would not have been protected outside the home, and it partially prevented the enforcement of state obscenity laws; but the decision was firmly grounded in the First Amendment. The right pressed upon us here has no similar support in the text of the Constitution, and it does not qualify for recognition under the prevailing principles for construing the Fourteenth Amendment. Its limits are also difficult to discern. Plainly enough, otherwise illegal conduct is not always immunized whenever it occurs in the home. Victimless crimes, such as the possession and use of illegal drugs do not escape the law where they are committed at home. Stanley itself recognized that its holding offered no protection for the possession in the home of drugs, firearms or stolen goods. ...And if respondent's submission is limited to the voluntary sexual conduct between consenting adults, it would be difficult, except by fiat, to limit the claimed right to homosexual conduct while leaving exposed to prosecution adultery, incest, and other sexual crimes even though they are committed in the home. We are unwilling to start down that road.
The Court only recognizes the right of privacy in sexual relations between man and wife, and expressly DENIES a Constitutional right to homosexual sex based on privacy. As I've already told you for the umteenth time. But you are more concerned about saying you are right, than in being right. You are wrong, for all the reasons I've said before. Don't choke on the crow.
Derek |
