"Justice Scalia, do you sodomize your wife?"

[elfs]

Yesterday, law student Eric Berndt had the guts to walk up to a microphone at a public symposium and ask Judge Antonin Scalia, "Do you sodomize your wife?"

The audience was shocked, the mike was shut off, and a lot of right wing bloggers pulled out their knives and went to work.

Justice Scalia said the question was unworthy of the forum. Except that Berdnt had asked the perfect question, after Lawrence v. Texas: Justice Scalia argued in his response that the legal interests of the United States include the private actions of all citizens, heterosexual as well as homosexual. Justice Scalia believes, after Bork, that merely knowing that other people are permitted, in the privacy of their own bedrooms, to commit acts labeled sinful by some group, grants that group to assert that their public moral gratification is more important than your private sexual gratification and, in the balance, gives the U.S. the right to peer into everyone's bedroom.

If Justice Scalia has a worthwhile interest in what Eric Berndt does, Eric has every right to ask Justice Scalia for the same information. The question is the inevitable outcome of the Justice's own views.

---

In a similarly jaw-dropping vein, but in the other direction, Tom Delay was quoted in the Washington Times as saying "The reason they [the Supreme Court] have been able to impose a right to privacy that's nowhere in the Constitution is because Congress didn't stop them."

Remember that. Congress should have taken your right to privacy away a long time ago. So says Tom Delay.

Comments

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

It goes to show that the tyranny of the majority, whether or not they're a real majority or most folks are just cowering in the shadow of the Hangman (c.f., the Maurice Ogden poem) and don't want to speak out against the injustice, is still alive and well. That Oregon Supreme Court would decide that it's perfectly acceptable for the majority to declare that a specific class of consenting adults need to be discriminated against when it comes to civil unions or marriage underscores this as well.

While the courts' sensible decision (or rather, refusal to hear and render a decision) in the Schiavo case was refreshing, these latest rounds of crap are doing much to send my confidence in ALL branches of our Federal government to an all-time low.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Tom Delay can kiss my furry little butt. So can Tony Scalia, for that matter. Both are poking their nose in my business where it doesn't belong. It's an old tenent of English common law that if you poke your nose in my castle without my permission, I can remove it. And then you'll look like Tycho Brahe. If, that is, I'm polite.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

That's a good way to put it: "merely knowing that other people are permitted, in the privacy of their own bedrooms, to commit acts labeled sinful by some group, grants that group to assert that their public moral gratification is more important than your private sexual gratification"

I think. It will never make a bumper sticker.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

"... grants that group the right..." Sorry about that.

And it's not an original statement. Those are Bork's own words. If he had gotten on the court instead of Souter, we'd all be in much worse shape right now. Bork's analysis of Griswold v. Connecticut contained exactly that language: the majority would be anguished to know that birth control was being used in Connecticut, the Constitution says nothing about the supremacy of sexual gratification over moral gratification, therefore the law which banned contraception was superior to overturning the law and permitting married couples to use contraception, strictly on the democratic basis that it had greater popular support.

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

Dude! (Sorry for the Bill and Ted moment, but it persists when ever someone has told me something outrageous)

That's supposed to be why we're a representative republic, so that the majority cannot destroy the rights of the minority. Ew, I feel all slimy now.