The court gets it right on sodomy laws, but Bush appointees could make for some bad times in the future.
By: Hank Kalet
A ruling today from the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of freedom and personal liberty.
The court ruled 6-3 that a Texas law against "deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex" was unconstitutional because it "demeans the lives of homosexual persons" and the men who challenged the law "are entitled to respect for their private lives," according to a majority opinion authored by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
"The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime," he said (quoted from The Washington Post).
Watchers of the court and of the Bush administration should take note of the dissent written by Justice Anthony Scalia in which the judge said "The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" and "The court has taken sides in the culture war."
Justice Scalia, who like U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) professes to have "nothing against homosexuals," is the model on which President George W. Bush (this is what he said during his campaign) will make his own judicial appointments.
Here’s what The Nation magazine has to say about one of his latest nominees, William Pryor, the 40-year-old attorney general of Alabama, who the president is hoping to seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th circuit:
"Pryor has called Roe v. Wade ‘the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.’ He’s compared homosexuality to necrophilia and incest. He’s fought aggressively to prevent the disabled from enforcing their rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. He’s urged Congress to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, which protects the right to vote for African-Americans. He’s argued that the First Amendment doesn’t mandate ‘the strict separation of church and state,’ and that ‘the challenge of the next millennium will be to preserve the American experiment by restoring its Christian perspective.’" (The Nation is launching a drive to stop his appointment.)
And there is this piece on Mr. Pryor from Salon, which calls him a "right-wing caricature."
The Washington Post is also calling for the defeat of William Pryor, saying he shows "several attitudes that should be anathema to any federal judge: contempt for judges with whom they disagree, a vision of the judiciary as essentially political in nature, and a desire to see matters of national controversy resolved in such a way as to highlight the political differences among jurists." And remember, the Post has endorsed the nominations of the other hard-core Bush nominees.