[sd-joe]

>> "Interpreted this way, Lawrence is a prescription for judicial dictatorship."

I don't see how you can reach that conclusion. The Lawrence ruling is about a specific Texas law.

It is interesting to view judicial rulings through the prism of protecting individual liberty from government interference. This is obviously a very libertarian (small l) point of view.

The difficulty in this approach is determining when an action does NOT hurt others, and is thus a protected liberty, and when it DOES hurt others and is thus a proscribed "license".

[tpaine]

The difficulty in this approach is determining when an action does NOT hurt others, and is thus a protected liberty, and when it DOES hurt others and is thus a proscribed "license".
7 -joe-


The law makers have to determine the 'compling reason' for a specific law, just as they should. It may be difficult, but that's their job.

If they err in their logic, the law is repugnant to the constitution, and void, -- just as Justice Marshall observed back in Marbury v Madison, 1803.

[MHGinTN]

You wrote, "The difficulty in this approach is determining when an action does NOT hurt others, and is thus a protected liberty, and when it DOES hurt others and is thus a proscribed 'license'."

The way that was dealt with--in order to grant license to kill the unborn--in 1973 was to sweep aside the notion that the unborn are individual human beings and thus persons worthy of protection from having their LIFE taken from them without due process of law. Oh, to be sure, no one wrote such a truth in the Roe v Wade ruling ... it was the underlying assumption that a woman's liberty trumped the LIFE of a non-person.

[Zack Nguyen]

The Lawrence ruling is about a specific Texas law.

That is the thing - it is not just about a Texas law. It was about 12 other state's laws as well.

Furthermore, the net was cast so broadly here that laws forbidding smae-sex marriage, bestiality, incest, prostitution, obscenity, bigamy, adultery, etc. are put at risk as well. This was not a narrow decision.