Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose
"… to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern." – Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN)
The ink is barely dry on the landmark Supreme Court decision throwing out the Texas sodomy law, and already the armies of self-righteous busybodies are crawling out of the woodwork. Senator Frist, like his colleague Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Attorney General Ashcroft are shocked and horrified to discover that their right to dictate to other adults what they can do in the privacy of their own homes is suddenly in jeopardy. With luck, they will make enough of a spectacle of themselves to tip the majority of decent, tolerant people in this country off to what we’re dealing with on the extreme Right: not the kind of policies, but the kind of people.
Let’s face it, most Americans hate self-righteous meddlers. The human desire to dictate to others what they can and can’t do is as strong here as it is anywhere, but historically, it’s been offset by a deep stigma against minding other people’s business. Part of that “melting-pot” thing, see? It’s not a matter of ideology, either. There are plenty of people who adhere to very strict religious beliefs or personal practices who nevertheless would never presume to impose them on others, just as they themselves would not stand for anyone telling them how to live.
When Americans talk about freedom, most of them mean precisely being able to do what you please as long as you don’t hurt other people or property. The American hatred for arbitrary authority – from bosses, schoolmarms, and nosy neighbors to stuffed shirts and self-righteous know-it-alls – is manifest in our national history, arts and culture from the Colonial period through the Old West and down to the present day. Good old ethnic, racial and sexual prejudice is fine, of course, but once you start wagging your finger about “moral decency,” you’re going to lose a lot of solid, salt-of-the-earth folks who believe personal morality is a matter between the individual and God, and not anyone else’s business.
If there’s one thing you can take to the bank, it’s that the Right is utterly tone-deaf on this issue and will start pouring forth their idiocy in the most strident manner, confident that they are trailing the country along behind them in their moral wake. It simply does not occur to these people that it is the very antithesis of freedom, not to mention the very definition of what it means to be an asshole, to presume to know what is best for other adults – although it is dead obvious to anyone who catches their act. Just ask Kenneth Starr.
The problem here is that the Texas case was so stark in its particulars that even a profoundly Right-leaning Supreme Court couldn’t look it in the face and fail to see how deeply these idiotic morality laws offend the notion of freedom enshrined in our Constitution. Police-state proponents Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas, who have no problem granting corporations the most egregious liberties against public interests, were reduced to sputtering objections using politically-loaded jargon and crass innuendo (“this court has signed on to the Homosexual Agenda…”). They understand perfectly that if you are stupid enough to subject laws rooted in sexual anxiety and prejudice to the clear light of logic, of course they will fail the test of Constitutionality! They know exactly where this leads – freedom – and they don’t like it one bit.
George Will notes (accurately, though with palpable horror) “The logic of the ruling, which the court flinches from recognizing, is that no legitimate state interest is served by any law for the promotion of a majority's convictions about sexual morality.”
To which all decent Americans ought to say, “and amen for that!” Most people, even those who profess to share the moral views of the majority, respect privacy enough to know that if we let a few uptight jerks define it for the rest of us, pretty soon we will all be in trouble of one kind or another. When you attack the notion of privacy, you attack one of the core principles of what it means to be American, no matter how many layers of the flag you wrap yourself in while you’re doing it.
We just fought a war against the Taliban. It’s about time we threw them out of our own country, too. Because, let’s say it plainly: these assholes think they know best what other adults should and shouldn’t do in private. Sorry, this is America. Learn the rules.
11:28:54 PM 
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