Dead to Rights

I'm back!

I want to thank my blogfather Jeff as well as Don Watkins for mentioning me even while I wasn't there. I am still trying to get caught up with my blog reading, because I make it a daily habit to read every new post by each link in my blogroll every day, and a lot gets said in an entire week.

A lot has been said about Lawrence v. Texas, too. Tactically, I still think it would have been better to get rid of sodomy laws state by state, because that would have been a more democratic, more final, victory. The sodomy laws were ultimately doomed, but the fundamentalists will now falsely claim that the "good moral Christian people of this land" were stepped on by a totalitarian Big Brother Supreme Court. They will never shut up about it, and there will be much to blog about. Read Don Watkins' very thorough fisking of Cal Thomas. (I am feeling too magnanimous to remind anyone of the pre-911 love affair many of the moral conservatives were having with Islamic fundamentalism. They'd better be nice too, or I might start remembering a few morsels....)

As I had told Don Watkins, many conservatives are all for states rights when a state is trying to take away freedom, but let that same state dare attempt to expand freedom (as in the case of liberalized marijuana laws), and they'll goose step all over everyone in the name of federal supremacy.

Read this chilling account of precisely such a federal railroading -- of individual rights, states rights, and local rights. Never mind that California's voters passed Proposition 215 in 1996. The jury wasn't allowed even to hear about it!

(Similar laws were passed by voters in Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Oregon and Washington.)

Problem is, I like states rights. I just don't think that an expansive reading of the doctrine should give any government -- state, federal or local -- the right to force me to go to the back of the bus, or to force open the door to my bedroom.

I wish people would remember that government force does not always come in the form of Bull Connor or John Ashcroft, though. Government force can masquerade as an altruistic concern over the very rights many of my friends demand -- so dressed up in human rights or domestic rights drag as to be unrecognizable. A couple of weeks ago, I expressed reservations about the wisdom of inviting the government enforcement mechanism (and the long arm of the law) into a lifestyle which has long been invisible on the radar screen.

This is from the latest Reason Magazine:

What do you do after you've won one of the most important Supreme Court cases in decades and shoved the state, kicking and screaming, out of your bedroom? Apparently, you beg the government to walk right back in. "The Marriage Revolution" has arrived, and homosexuals are the unlikely heroes of the quest to revive a fading institution.

But just try to opt out of it.

I blogged about these concerns before and I am just as worried now about the state's foot in the door. A recent post in Samizdata made me think some more about the infinite expansion of law and bureaucracy to regulate anyone and everyone, in this case in the name of protecting everyone from "domestic violence":

The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.

Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.

So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.

Sure, that's over there in England, you might say. Here we have rights.

Really? What about federal gun control laws which take away your Second Amendment rights on the merest accusation by an aggrieved "domestic partner?" As the law stands, a woman need only ask for a restraining order and, as if by magic, her partner loses his Second Amendment rights. Read about it here. (In that case, a woman simply complained that her husband had verbally threatened her boyfriend, an allegation which automatically criminalized any gun ownership by her husband.)

Slippery slope?

Will homosexuals be allowed to opt out? I doubt it. In fact, based on my personal experience with gay activists around the gun issue, I can state with confidence that far too many homosexuals fear and loathe firearms as it is. Given an opportunity to disarm a gun-owning lover by simply filling out the correct legal form, many a vengeful politically correct ex would jump at the opportunity.