Does Roberts Oppose the Right to Privacy?

Is that what his former Reagan Justice Department colleague, Bruce Fein, is telling us?

The Washington Post has a front page article that documents how the White House is withholding the papers of John Roberts:

Thrown on the defensive by recent revelations about Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.'s legal work, White House aides are delaying the release of tens of thousands of documents from the Reagan administration to give themselves time to find any new surprises before they are turned into political ammunition by Democrats.

For me, this is a key paragraph:

While serving in the Reagan and Bush administrations, for instance, Roberts argued against affirmative-action quotas and other civil rights remedies that conservatives regarded as reverse discrimination, and he expressed deep skepticism about what he called the "so-called right to privacy" that underpins the constitutional right to abortion.

"They should be embracing those memos," said Bruce Fein, who worked with Roberts in the Reagan Justice Department. "They are squandering the opportunity to move public perception."

Embracing those memos means Roberts wants to overturn the right to privacy. Only in warped right wing world could that be viewed as a positive that would move public perception.

Fein wrote an op-ed for the Reverend Moon's paper on August 2, 2005 that trashed the right to privacy. He and Roberts were colleagues in the Reagan Justice Department and exchanged memos on that subject. Fein is a hard-core right winger who presumably knows something about Roberts legal views as he intimated in his column:

In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the court again highlighted the nonconstitutional moorings of the right of privacy. Justice Kennedy discerned a right to homosexual sodomy from the penumbras of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its Framers, the justice insisted, had been blind to the oppression his generation recognized in searching for greater freedom. In other words, if the true meaning of the Constitution does not ordain a liberal agenda, the justices should entertain a false meaning that does the trick.

Judge Roberts has awakened vocal opposition from the female Democratic six and their ideological allies because he disputes the view of the Griswold-Roe-Casey-Lawrence precedents that constitutional law is politics by other means. What liberals fear is an obligation to convince the American people as opposed to a handful of justices that their agenda should be law.

If Roberts opposes the Griswold-Roe-Casey-Lawrence precedents, we're in serious trouble. That means he opposes the right to privacy. The right wingers not only want to overturn Roe v. Wade, they want privacy rights gone. As Fein made clear, that means gay rights too. Nothing will be sacred. Overturning the right to privacy is an ultimate goal of the theocrats.

This is really serious stuff. If Roberts opposes the right to privacy, we have to know. After all the missteps, the right-wingers will want to know that he is on their side on this one.

Roberts has to answer questions about the constitutional right to privacy.