Thursday, August 04, 2005

Back to the future

Sort of pathetic, isn't it, how much things have changed in the US.
The President wants creationism taught in the schools.
The Vice-President doesn't want Congress to pass legislation banning torture of prisoners.
A US Senator talks about how the Supreme Court decision which legalized birth control was wrongly decided, because states should be able to pass whatever laws they want.
Most dangerous of all, Americans may well be on the verge of losing their right to privacy.
Today, John Roberts got nationwide publicity just because he isn't prejudiced against gay people. Is being prejudiced against some of your fellow citizens now considered a desireable trait in someone being considered for the Supreme Court? Maybe so.
But Liberal Oasis looks today at a more important qualification -- whether Roberts would overturn Supreme Court decisions giving people the right to privacy. I guess the argument against privacy goes that because their Bill of Rights doesn't specifically SAY that government should not intrude on personal decisions or private behaviour, therefore governments should be able to interfere with personal decisions any way they want -- make birth control illegal, arrest people for sodomy, prevent women from having abortions, deny people the right to die, and so on and so on.
LO writes
We already found out last week that John Roberts believes there are “judicial excesses embodied in Roe v. Wade” and that Roe is an example of “unprincipled jurisprudence.” And now we just learned that Roberts refers to the constitutional right to privacy as the “so-called ‘right to privacy’.” Everyone knows what one intends to convey when one adds the “so-called” moniker: that whatever follows “so-called” is bunk.
These guys don't want to just go back to the 60s, before abortion was legal, or back to the 50s, when beating prisoners was OK -- they want to go back to the 1920s, when birth control was illegal and or back to the 1860s, before Darwin ever postulated evolution.
Back to those good old days before that awful Civil War, when everything was just so perfect.

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