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Ahh, my political foil the populist. Greetings. Here are my questions:

1) Just because a majority of people believe something to be bad doesn't mean it should be illegal. And whether you like it or not, or agree with it or not, the right to privacy has been established as part of the United States Constitution. We have precedent. That whole unreasonable search and seizures thing is pretty clear though. Do we really want our government to get bigger and bigger to the point it is knocking on people's bedroom doors to find out what they are doing?

2) Since when has this government, or any other government, been successful in regulating morality onto people's hearts? Homosexual intercourse is definitely a sin. So is sex between unmarried men and women, and so is sex where birth control is used, and so is sex where the partners do not love each other. This is Catholic doctrine on sex. Eating pork is a sin to many groups, but should it be illegal? What if those people who believed it was a sin were a majority?

3) Since when does Conservative mean giving the government more powers?

4) Polygamy and bigamy aren't just illegal because they're immoral. They are illegal because it (unfairly, in my opinion) allows 30, 40, or 50 year old men to enslave 13 year old girls as one of their "wives".

5) Incest is bad because it creates the possibility of horribly mutated children.

[....Polygamy and bigamy aren't just illegal because they're immoral. They are illegal because it (unfairly, in my opinion) allows 30, 40, or 50 year old men to enslave 13 year old girls as one of their "wives".....]

1. Does that mean that you wouldn't object to polygamy, if it involved a 50 year old man, and five women in their twenties (i.e. Clinton's fantasy world)? If privacy is a constitutional right, then on what basis would you object to a polygamist living with five wives who are all consenting adults?

2. If a 60 year old man decided to marry his 30 year old daughter, then on what basis can society object to that marriage, if the right to privacy is absolute?

Rick Santorum was making the same point I am raising on those two issues. Our laws have to reflect our values, and community standards have to be observed. Changing the Texas law is the responsibility of the state legislature, not the courts.

Underclassman,

Stay in school. My favorite part of your rant was when you accused this admitted more liberal-independent of 3) Since when does Conservative mean giving the government more powers?

HA! That's great, way to beat that straw man. Why don't you save that zinger for someone it relates to? Did you even read anything they wrote?

I won't even bother refuting all your sometimes extreme-always totally wrong-NAMBLA wing of the Liberatarian Party points, but one that really bugged me;

Don't soil the arguement of those against greater government intrusion by claiming that something is in the Constitution because whether you like it or not...We have precedent. How offensively hypocritical and ignorant.

4) Polygamy and bigamy aren't just illegal because they're immoral. They are illegal because it (unfairly, in my opinion) allows 30, 40, or 50 year old men to enslave 13 year old girls as one of their "wives".

Well, are you going to break this news to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the other patriarchs who practiced polygamy with God's approval? If you can cite any scripture where homosexual acts were practiced with God's approval, I might be willing to reconsider your moral equivalence, but until then...

The horse is already out of the barn on this issue. The Supreme Court decided circa 1890 the federal government had the right to regulate marriage when they ruled the Mormon's practice of plural marriage as a religious belief was not protected under the First Amendment.

If a Biblically approved practice of religious belief can be banned, where do the gays get the idea their behavior gives them a greater "right"?

And whether you like it or not, or agree with it or not, the right to privacy has been established as part of the United States Constitution. We have precedent.

The Supreme Court once ruled that blacks could never be citizens of the United States. The Supreme Court also ruled at one time that the 14th Amendment permitted "separate but equal" facilities for people of different races. So much for precedent. Contrary to your assertion, the fact that the Supreme Court has said there is a "right-to-privacy" in the Constitution does not make it so. The simple fact is there is no such right in the text of the Constitution. It was found by "learned", unelected, life-time tenured judges looking at penumbras, shadows and emanations. The Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states and the people those powers not prohibited to them by the Constitution. These laws were on the books when the Tenth Amendment was adopted. They fall within the powers reserved to the States by the Tenth Amendment.

The Constitution begins, "WE THE PEOPLE". We the people get to influence the kind of society we want to live in via the legislative process at the state level. The kind of argument being made on these Santorum threads, whether such laws are foolish, wise, necessary, or unnecessary is precisely the kind of debate that should take place in the legislative process. And certainly different states would have different outcomes on which laws they choose to enact, as Santorum noted. That is the beauty of our Federal system of government. Don't like Texas' strict sodomy laws? Move to New York or California where the law is more to your liking. Or get enough votes in your state's legislature to change the law.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has gutted the Federal system of government. They are engaged in their "enlightened" social engineering to force their version of (im)morality on the rest of the country as a national standard. In that process they have short-circuited our system of government, installing themselves as a super-legislature that serves for life, never stands for election, and is accountable to no one. That is not what the United States Constitution stands for. I applaud Senator Santorum for addressing the issue.

The issue, to my mind, is one of states rights and restraint on the part of the US Supreme Court. I highly commend to you Robert Bork's The Tempting of America. In point of fact, unless there is a state or US Constitutional provision to the contrary, we empower our state legislatures to make all KINDS of laws, some of which turn out to be pretty stupid. Fortunately, state laws can be amended or overturned, local authorities maintain a degree of subjectivity in the enforcement of such laws, and the people can demonstrate for change in such laws. Such is not the case with Supreme Court fiat on what constitutes Constitutional rights. Once created (or interpreted, depending on your point of view), these rights are extremely difficult to amend or overturn, and once they have achieved notoriety among their supporters, enforcement is virtually assured. This is the problem. Constitutional rights should not be determined willy-nilly. A little of the people's rights to self-determination is lost upon each expansion of these so-called rights. I prefer to trust those I elect, or to replace them as necessary.