Saturday Evening Judicial Reiew Post #6
Building upon last week’s assertion, that today’s SCOTUS opinions are built on non-existent precedents, we want to further explore the ramifications of such practices.
We want to explore the issue of the nonexistent “right to privacy”. You may read the United States Constitution from beginning to end, and will not find any general right to privacy clause in it. It simply is not there. The framers did not assume such a right to exist, because criminal and evil activity could take place behind such a cloak of darkness, and individuals would escape accountability for such acts. There are numerous statutes on the books against such crimes as murder, incest, or rape among many others. If such crimes as the above were committed in the privacy of one’s own home, with a general right to privacy, the offending individuals would never face prosecution based on a broad right to privacy.
The open door, so to speak, for the right to privacy began in 1961 with Poe v. Ullman. The case brought by Planned Parenthood against a Connecticut law which prohibited the sale and use of contraceptives. The SCOTUS dismissed the case for lack of enforcement against the people involved in the case. Justice Harlan wrote a dissent against dismissing the case. In that dissent he wrote the following:
“I believe that a statute making it a criminal offense for married couples to use contraceptives is an intolerable and unjustifiable invasion of privacy in the conduct of the most intimate concerns of an individual’s personal life.”
It was later discovered that Justice Harlan had derived his ideas concerning privacy rights from Melvin L. Wulf, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. Wulf filed the ACLU’s “friend of the court” brief in Poe v. Ullman. This is part of Wulf’s explanation for what he wrote in the brief:
“Since the issue of sexual privacy had not been raised in any earlier case, we employed the familiar technique of argument by analogy: If there is no exact counterpart to the particular case before the Court, there are others that resemble it in a general sort of way, and the principles applied in the similar cases should also be applied perhaps even extended a little bit, to the new case.”
Harlan’s opinion was a minority dissenting opinion and had no immediate legal effect. In 1965, Planned Parenthood brought another case against the same Connecticut law, this time after actually being arrested, and quoting Mark Levin, “Justice William O. Douglas adopted Harlan’s reasoning in the majority opinion in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, and the right to privacy became constitutional law”.
Again we see law being written from the bench, based on nonexistent precedents. Some opinions were placed in the Court records on purpose, for use in later cases yet to be tried in the future. All of these actions were done under the cloak of dignity, reasonable arguments, and the “infallible rulings” of the Supreme Court of The United States.
All quotations above were taken from Mark R. Levin’s book entitled, Men In Black. This is an outstanding book, and a must read for anyone wanting to have an understanding of how the SCOTUS has abused their branch of the government to legislate from the bench.
We will continue with this important issue again next Saturday.
May 14th, 2005 at 11:50 am
[…] Post As we examine once again the right to privacy issue which we began exploring last week, we want to look at the next s […]
July 25th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
[…] Concerning number one above, by their own admission, these Justices have stated the fact, that there is no right to privacy guarantee in the Federal Constitution. We have also documented that premise before, here, and here. There is no need to further prove that it does not exist. […]