Steve,

Just one little correction to your post: Virtually all laws involve morality.

Morality covers anything saying one thing is 'right' and another is 'wrong.' If we say murder is immoral, that's the same as saying sodomy is immoral. We're saying that they're things people ought not do.

What you are doing, however, is drawing a distinction between private and public morality, or at least enforcing John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle' that only those moral standards that create direct and verifiable harm to other people should be enforced by the law. You should specify that more clearly; if we didn't 'legislate morality,' we'd have anarchy.

Good point.

I see this as just another 'slippery slope' argument. What the Supreme Court has done is expanded an unenumerated right - one of those not specifically spelled out in the Bill of Rights. I have heard more than one Conservative Pundit say that Americans have NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY. There's NO RIGHT TO PRIVACY IN THE CONSTITUTION they say.

Pardon the fuck out of me, but doesn't the Ninth Amendment say "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."? I do INDEED have a right to privacy, and AFAIK, what I and my wife do in the privacy of our home, so long as it is consenting and no injury occurs (i.e., no "victimization") IT'S NOT THE STATE'S BUSINESS. Yet the State has, in the past, put limits on that.

Clayton Cramer disagrees with the decision saying that sodomy laws date back to pre-revolution times, so of course they're constitutional. He has a point, but what I think we've seen here is the Supreme Court expanding an individual right. The libertarian part of me is all for the EXPANSION of individual rights.

So now we fear incest, polygamy, pedophilia, bestiality, lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Take the position of the ACLU and fight each expansion.

But don't tell me I have no right to privacy because it wasn't enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

"But don't tell me I have no right to privacy because it wasn't enumerated in the Bill of Rights."

Who said that? I sure didn't. I'm a libertarian, and I'm all for individual freedoms. In fact, I was quite pleased of the "ends" of the case, in other words, that the sodomy law is null and void. I just don't agree with the "means", in other words, using the SCOTUS to acheive what should have been a state issue.

The slippery slope argument is a valid one indeed. With today's society in the habit of creating rights, whose to say they cannot do the same for medicine, housing, education, and any other number of things.

In this case, I was pleased with the results. That doesn't mean that the "ends justify the means".

On a side note, I find it interesting that some of the people that want to create rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution (ie: health care, education) don't want to recognize some of the rights that are enumerated (ie: guns, free speech and religion).

Kevin,

The 9th Amendment was never intended to give you a right to commit sodomy or to give you a nebulous right to privacy. It was intended to restrict FEDERAL POWER; not to give the Supreme Court a blank check to invent whatever 'rights' it chooses.

If you support the foundation of American democracy, you cannot, in good conscience, support the view that the 9th Amendment grants the Supreme Court the authority to establish unenumerated rights at will.