Conservative Double-Standard. The letters
section of today's (Dec. 13) Wall Street Journal leads off with an
excellent dispatch from the Cato Institute's Roger Pilon, headlined
"The Complexities of 'Unfair Discrimination'" (alas, the WSJ in
online only to subscribers). Pilon takes the Journal to task for
its Dec. 3 editorial urging the Supreme Court to strike down state
affirmative action statutes but not to find state sodomy laws
unconstitutional. Writes Pilon:
Trouble is"the arguments that compel the court to strike state affirmative action programs apply equally to state sodomy laws. ... If affirmative action is unconstitutional because it unfairly discriminates, so too is the Texas [sodomy] statute".
Pilon then takes up the issue of sodomy laws in general, citing
not the "privacy right" claimed by many sexual freedom advocates,
but the 14th Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause:
which was meant to protect, among other things, the freedom and personal integrity of the individual." We have here, in short, nothing more complicated than "the right to be left alone," as Justice Brandeis famously put it. If the Constitution does not protect that, we have been sorely misled about its stature.
Take that, WSJ editorial writers!
--Stephen H. Miller