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  • POINT- COUNTERPOINT Yesterday, Isabel

    Filed at 2:43 am under by dcobranchi

    POINT- COUNTERPOINT Yesterday, Isabel Lyman briefly defended Rick Santorum. Today, Skip Oliva resolves that Santorum would just as soon scrap the Ninth Amendment.

    I’m with Skip on this one. Here’s a snippet of Justice Goldberg’s concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut:

    To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever. Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment.

    I think the Texas sodomy case (the one Santorum finds so troubling), is just a very small extension of this line of thought. What consenting adults do in their own bedrooms is their own business.

    UPDATE: Lest you think this is all OT- Santorum is a homeschooling dad. I’d like to ask him, “Is homeschooling a fundamental right or is it a privilege granted by the state?” I’d argue that it is a right. The Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters held:

    [W]e think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control. As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.

    But, where is this “liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control” written in the Constitution? It’s not. The implication is that this is one of the unenumerated rights in the Ninth Amendment. The same amendment that makes Santorum so uncomfortable.

    It’s all related. How many kids to have (Griswold). When to have them (Griswold). How to raise them (Pierce). All of these are private decisions that the government cannot regulate. They’re all founded in the right to privacy. The same right that Santorum thinks doesn’t exist. It seems a strange position for a homeschooling dad to take.

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