June 26, 2003

Dean's World is rather elequent on today's Court ruling:

Unfortunate Decision With Good Results

The Supreme Court struck down a Texas sodomy law today. I'm glad to see the law gone, but I'm sorry about the decision anyway. Democratic freedoms are still being regularly eroded by the Supreme Court, and this is just another example of it.

In the 1980s, the Supreme Court declared that states have a right to have such laws. That decision was correct, in my view. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be in the business of deciding whether it "likes" or "agrees with" a law. The Justices are not supposed to decide that their commute is too long and rule speed limits unConstitutional. There are all kinds of laws I don't like, but I'd be horrified if the Supreme Court simply started throwing them out on my behalf.

As James Taranto's "Best of the Web" notes, in 1986, when the Supreme Court ruled that such laws were not unConstitutional, 24 states had them. Today, only 13 do. In other words, we were already on track on dealing with this issue via democratic means. When it comes to contentious social issues, it strikes me as particularly sad that we increasingly expect the courts to "do what's right for us," rather than go about the messy work of the legislative process.

Ah well. A bad law's gone, as are several like it. I just want to add my voice to those who note that it's sad when we celebrate democracy being trampled once again by the courts.

I come from the West. Most of the problems the Supreme Court has been trying to fix come out of the East and the South, e.g. the contraception laws, the abortion laws, the sodomy laws, etc. The people out here solve our problems the democratic way -- we vote on them. You don't find most of these laws in Oregon, Washington and California. To get the results they want for folks in the East and the South, the Supreme Court has been trashing the constitution for all of us. And its a damn shame.

Posted by Greg Ransom