Liberals can't stay out of your wallet; conservatives can't stay out of your bedroom.
The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Texas anti-sodomy law. The Rick Santorums are advised that family values and personal revulsion are not constitutional benchmarks for permitting police raids between the sheets.
The ruling was 6-3. It overturned the 1986 case, Bowers v. Hardwick , which upheld a Georgia anti-sodomy law.
The dissenters were the conservative core, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who wrote a blistering attack.
The majority focused on the right to be left alone in our adult, consensual, private relationships and behaviors. (We'd also add equal protection under the law.)
Mr. Justice Scalia would uphold "the ancient proposition that the governing majority's belief that certain sexual behavior is 'immoral and unacceptable' constitutes a rational basis for regulation." The question, to him, is whether there is a right to sodomy.
The answer is as succinct as Scalia's question is crass: Yes -- just as a man has the right to eat gobs of marbled beef that lead to a heart attack that leaves his children fatherless and on welfare.
But Scalia warns: "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws on moral choices."
Before pandemonium breaks out, let's acknowledge that people do this stuff anyway.
"Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means," Scalia says.
That is not clear. The Framers gave us a constitutional republic because the tyranny and meddlesomeness of democracy is all too real.
