Enemy Combatant
Friday, May 02, 2003
Reason #437 why Santorum is an idiot
I've been thinking long and hard about this "right to privacy" issue, given voice by quite possibly the Senate's dimmest member (a noun I use euphemistically), and I realize that we need to change the terminology if we ever want to draw a few libertarian conservatives to our side.
From now on, it's NOT "the right to privacy" -- it's "the right to be left alone" -- get it? Good.
Now let's take a quick, strict-constructionist look at the Ninth Amendment -- it says,
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
My read on that is that while the government is given limited, enumerated powers, certain other rights not expressly enumerated under the Constitution are nonetheless to be protected from government encroachment.
In other words, the "right to be left alone."
Now, what's this got to do with Santorum, you ask? Well, let's look at the kernel upon which Roe v. Wade is built: Griswold v. Connecticut. This 1965 US Supreme Court decision established that -- for married heterosexual couples at least -- there was (and still is, last I checked) a constitutional right to access to birth control devices. (The heavily Catholic Connecticut legislature had banned the sale of all such devices -- the pill, IUDs, condoms -- virtually everything. The Court expanded this ruling as applicable to nonmarried couples in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird.)
But what does Griswold rely on as precedent? Primarily two cases, from the 1920s: Pierce v. Society of Sisters, and Meyer v. Nebraska.
Pierce established that, under the Constitution, the state legislature could not require every high school student to attend public school -- an obvious attempt to destroy (or at least marginalize) Catholic schools.
Meyer stands for the proposition that parents' rights to educate their children trumps the state government's claim that it had the right to ban the teaching of the German language, even in private schools.
Before Santorum and other RW idiots begin pulling at this thread, they ought to consider taking a look at everything they'll unravel.
