The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn a Texas sodomy law was part of a disturbing trend in American jurisprudence.
The issue is much bigger than the law itself. Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his dissent that he would have voted against the law if he were a member of the Texas legislature. And that is precisely the point. The United States Supreme Court is not a legislature, the very place where such decisions should be made.
Most disturbing, however, is the Court’s embrace of “gay rights” as a civil liberty protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. One can almost imagine Abraham Lincoln’s reaction to such a reading of the Constitution. This is the kind of wild judicial activism that gave us Roe v. Wade and dozens of other constitutionally dubious decisions. It is unclear exactly where the Court’s use of “privacy” rights will lead, but this decision may well be a bad omen of things yet to come.
