Sodomy and the right to privacy. This is getting fun already.
From the Boston Globe:
As a senior at Princeton University, Samuel A. Alito Jr. chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden."....Also, I'm not saying Alito is a big liberal, so please spare me the short-sighted comments about "how you can say he's a liberal!" I'm not an idiot. But, being soft on sodomy, so to speak, is a big deal to the religious right - the very people this nomination is meant to mollify. You've got to remember that it was Lawrence v. Texas, the recent Supreme Court decision that ruled state sodomy laws unconstitutional, that got the religious right going on the whole "gay marriage" crusade. The religious right, with Scalia as their leader, freaked out over Lawrence v. Texas. First, because they want to jail gays simply for being gay. But second, because, they argued, that Lawrence would lead to gay marriage.
'We sense a great threat to privacy in modern America," Alito wrote in a foreword to the report, in 1971. ''We all believe that privacy is too often sacrificed to other values; we all believe that the threat to privacy is steadily and rapidly mounting; we all believe that action must be taken on many fronts now to preserve privacy."....
The report covered what its undergraduate authors saw as increasing threats to privacy in the late 1960s, questioning whether the ''cybernetic revolution" would result in more invasions of privacy and criticizing government surveillance of ''mild dissenters on the war in Vietnam."
Alito, who would probably rule on many privacy issues arising from the Bush administration's pursuit of the war on terror, wrote in his 1971 introduction: ''We are convinced that in recent years government has often used improper means to gather information about individuals who posed no threat either to their government or to their fellow citizens."
At the end Alito wrote: ''The erosion of privacy, unlike war, economic bad times, or domestic unrest, does not jump to the citizen's attention . . . But by the time privacy is seriously compromised, it is too late to clamor for reform."
In the religious right's mind, a defense of sodomy is a defense of gay marriage. That's why these Alito coming out against sodomy laws is such a big deal. And let's not even get into his support for legislation outlawing job discrimination against gays - the religious right will choke over that one. Not to mention, he was in favor of all of this 30 friggin' years ago, folks. I mean, Harriet was making pro-gay signs 15 years ago. This was 30 YEARS AGO.
Oh yeah, the fun has just begun.
