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View Full Version : Where is that in the Constitution?



Jolie Rouge
04-01-2005, 12:45 PM
-- Alan Sears

Does the U.S. Constitution really protect the distribution of graphic—even hard-core pornographic—videos depicting rape and murder? Unfortunately, a U.S. District Court judge in Pittsburgh seems to think so.

On January 20, Judge Gary Lancaster dismissed a 10-count obscenity indictment against the alleged distributors of hard-core pornography, Extreme Associates. In his ruling, this lower court judge unilaterally expanded the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2003 case that struck down Texas' homosexual sodomy prohibitions, Lawrence v. Texas.

Judge Lancaster opined that the Lawrence ruling could "be reasonably interpreted as holding that public morality is not a legitimate state interest sufficient to justify infringing on adult, private, consensual sexual conduct even if that conduct is deemed offensive to the general public's sense of morality."


Where did this so-called right to privacy relied on in the Extreme Associates ruling originate? Was it in the Constitution? Well, no, at least not in the words of the document. But activist judges seldom rely on the words of the Constitution but on opinions of other judges that can be stretched and re-interpreted to fit the causes activists choose to promote or protect. Over time, the original intent of the Constitution gets lost in the sediment from layers of judicial interpretations.

The First Amendment to the Constitution protects free speech, the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fourteenth Amendment promises due process and equal protection under the law. No author of the Bill of Rights could have conceived it would be stretched and reshaped to protect obscenity. One after another, activist court interpretations have eroded the original intent of these amendments to the present case, in which Judge Lancaster ruled that privacy rights created out of thin air trump "the general public's sense of morality."

The actual protections discussed in the constitutional amendments have morphed into "zones of privacy" through judicial interpretations. From Griswold v. Connecticut in 1969 to the present day, the courts have fabricated and expanded these zones to include more and more peripheral rights, limited only by the imagination in their scope, to be discovered on a case-by-case basis. Activist judges and their cohorts in the ACLU and elsewhere contend that these peripheral rights help make the actual rights named in the Constitution and its amendments more secure. Rights to equal protection and due process have morphed into privacy zones that include the right to unlimited abortion, the right to sodomy, and now the right to distribute pornographic videos depicting women being beaten, raped, and murdered. Were these the rights the writers of the Constitution and its amendments envisioned?


Zones of privacy, though not authorized in the words of the Constitution or its amendments, give ever more creative activist judges the ability to undermine morality and the public good.

Regardless of the language or rationalizations employed, the courts are overstepping the bounds set for them by the very Constitution they claim to uphold. These judges are legislating from the bench despite the fact that creating law and new rights is not the job of judges. The Constitution endowed Congress and the states with the powers to make laws, including obscenity laws. The job of the courts is to interpret the laws impartially in accordance with the Constitution, not to forward agendas that undermine the public good.

America needs judges who exercise judicial restraint and endeavor to interpret laws in accordance with the Constitution, not in spite of it. And, to be blunt, we must raise up a new generation of lawyers who understand and will apply the original intent of the Constitution's framers. With judges who seek to uphold the Constitution on the bench, the moral decay from rulings like that of Judge Lancaster in the Extreme Associates case can at least be reversed or at best prevented.

llbriteyes
04-01-2005, 01:51 PM
Yup. Let the government tell you exactly what you can watch and read. See and hear.

What time was that book burning?