Senator Santorum

[Terry Lambert]

Doug Barton wrote:
> On Tue, 6 May 2003, Colin Percival wrote:
> > At 10:23 06/05/2003 -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> > >"And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex
> > >within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to
> > >polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery.
> > >You have the right to anything."
> > >
> > >The annoying thing about what he said from the standpoint of the gay
> > >rights folks is that he's right. It really is a slippery legal slope.
> >
> >    Not quite.  Bigamy and polygamy aren't questions of sex; they're
> > questions of marriage.
> 
> They are also crimes in the US, which is the point he's making. Actually,
> you're supporting my argument, even if you don't realize it. :) If we
> decide that removing the laws against sodomy is ok because you have the
> right to do whatever you want behind closed doors, then the laws against
> the other things he mentioned should be removed too, for the same reason
> (see below for one important qualification). Then, once those laws are
> removed, laws against a lot of other consensual crimes should be removed
> too. That's the slippery slope.

Actually, the slippery slope, in the limit, is consensual
crimes include crimes where the victim voluntarily ceded
rights which are held to be inalienable, e.g. selling
themselves into slavery willingly in response to a fetish,
and then being resold unwillingly.

I think the senator used the inflamatory examples he used
merely to gain support for his side of the argument by
provoking outrage in people who would otherwise support it,
but couldn't fault his logic.  The most important part of
his statement was actually "...the right to anything".


> > As for incest and adultery... personally I don't see where the problem
> > lies with incest, providing that no (genetically impaired) children are
> > born of it,
> 
> ... and providing that all parties involved are "adults" in the sense that
> they are capable of giving informed consent to the acts in question. That
> of course is an entirely different topic of discussion.

Actually, it's back to the alienation of rights, and who
has the the responsibility for preventing it; in the limit,
we've decided that, if the parents do not do the job, then
society has both a right and an obligation to step in and
enforce inalienability.


> > and I can't think of any civilized state where adultery is illegal.
> 
> The limitations of your knowledge are not my responsibility. :) To take a
> trivial example, the Uniform Code of Military Justice in the US has
> penalties for adultery, although I'm not enough of an expert to make the
> distinction of whether it proclaims it "illegal," which is an oft-misused
> term.

If you are thinking of the (relatively) recent media feeding
frenzy, it was not a courts-marshall over adultery, per se,
it was a courts-marshall over disobeying a direct order to not
engage in adultery.  That's a totally different issue (Article
15).  The media made it about adultry, because adultry was more
salable to their consumers than the reality.

-- Terry