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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (116221)	5/25/2005 7:42:48 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793903

It seems that you are saying that we would be worse off without a right to privacy, and that our liberty would not be as protected, so it is good and proper and necessary that a right of privacy get read in to the constitution. Not what I'm saying at all. The problem is that a lot of rights and freedoms which we took for granted, which are rooted in our traditions, as the latest legal formulation states (a formulation I really like BTW), were never explicitly articulated because they didn't need to be, way back when. As statism grew, it has infringed on these unarticulated traditional rights and freedoms. Hence, the need to protect them has grown. It is the governments, primarily the state governments, which have been guilty. The recognition of the right to privacy is one way to accomplish the recognition of these traditional rights. There may be others, I don't know. It may be possible for the courts to say that such and such a right is a traditional freedom not found in the Constitution recognized by a person'sstatus as a sovereign human being, we hereby recognize it as such, and grant it protected status. The whole privacy doctrine may not be necessary at all. It is something I'm thinking about. Constitutional amendments are IMO not the answer because doing so requires consent of a majority within a state, though it only takes a certain number of states to enact an amendment. It is thus theoretically possible for a minority national vote to enact a constitutional amendment. And, besides, it is recognition of rights which is the issue, not a popularity contest or a sense that the majority shall define rights. Let that happen, and we are a step closer to totalitarianism. There are certain "inalienable rights" created by our condition as human beings, not just as citizens of the US, which require recognition and protection. Your approach gives the voters the right to determine what these inalienable rights might be, depending on the prevalent political mood or fashion. That would be a mistake.