From: John W Burgeson (jwburgeson@juno.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 18:17:00 EDT
Janet asked: "I guess my question is what laws are Justice Scalia talking
about? Is there a whole set of things that say we can lock up people for
adultery or fornication or masturbation? No offense intended to anyone's
views, but if there are such laws, I'm not sure that would be the best
use of our public safety resources. "
There have been such laws in the past. There are no doubt some of them
still around, but not every law on the books is enforced.
If I understand Scalia, he asserts that a government, say your local
city, can pass any law it wants to enforce "local morality" and that the
courts ought to be powerless to overturn that law.
I have an interesting newspaper article from the 1940s where a lady
decided to wash her car outside her home while wearing a bathing suit.
She was hauled into court and fined. The strange thing is that the writer
of the article saw nothing amiss in this action -- just a "funny story."
It is not all that long ago that if you used any form of birth control,
you could be prosecuted in several states. Just the act of purchase was
enough to trigger the men in blue carrying large guns.
John Burgeson (Burgy)
www.burgy.50megs.com
________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Aug 12 2003 - 18:48:54 EDT