"Dave" wrote
On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:54:41 -0500, "Vito" said:

our god-given right to privacy

Interesting phrase, coming from you, Vito. I've heard them called nine old
men, nine wise men, and prolly a few other things. But not gods.

The Declaration of Independence says all men are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights. The SC merely noted that reasonable
privacy, like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness (and breathing), was
obviously one of the inalienable rights endowed by our creator, whoever or
whatever you perceive our creator to be. And, since privacy of the marital
bed is among the foremost of privacies, government has no authority to
monitor let alone regulate what goes on there. Thus the miriad of laws
against birth control, et cetera, were unenforceable because the evidence
needed to enforce them was constitutionally impossible to obtain. If a cop
cannot peek into your bedroom he cannot know if you are sodomizing your wife
therein so he cannot arrest you. But that ruling didn't make these laws go
away. If a new court reverses that decision and says that Americans have no
right to privacy - that the government has a duty to monitor our every
activity to protect us from sin and terrorism - then off to prison you go
'cuz you have no doubt violated one or more of these laws.

BTW, I used 'god' (lower case) rather than 'our creator' to save bandwidth.

Note that the Constitution does NOT convey rights. It doesn't have to
because rights are endowed by our creator. It simply authorizes the
government to do certain things, like create a Navy and build "post roads",
strictly forbids it to do other things (like establish a religion or
infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms), and last but not
least, restricts any power or authority not delegated to fedgov to the
people or states. Thus fedgov has no constitutional authority to assist
education nor to regulate it making our government itself a traitor to the
constitution- right?

Note too that the authors of the Declaration studiously avoided saying "God"
because they envisioned a secular nation not a Christian nation as many
would prefer to believe.