An Odd Staclu Commenter

One of the frequent commenters at STACLU is a guy named Kerwin Brown. While bored, I followed a link to his blog and boy was that fun. He calls himself a "classical liberal" and calls his blog "Expressions of Liberty" while advocating laws against adultery and "fornication". That last post is just bizarre. First, he misunderstands the Lawrence v Texas ruling:

In an article by Professor of Law Joanna Grossman she commented that the Virginia State Supreme Court and other courts struck down the law for the same reason that laws against homosexuality were illegalized. The reason that is because they violated the right to privacy the unelected Oligarchy known as the Supreme Court created in 1965 through an unconstitutional judicial fiat.

I doubt he's actually read Lawrence, the ruling that struck down state anti-sodomy laws, but the most notable thing about the ruling, as Randy Barnett points out, is how little mention there is of a right to privacy. Barnett wrote:

Contrary to how their decision was widely reported, the Lawrence majority did not protect a ''right of privacy.'' Instead, quite simply, they protected ''liberty.''

And as he argues, this is a crucial distinction that was missed in almost all of the analysis of the ruling, both in the media and in legal scholarship. Kennedy's opinion did not rest upon the right to privacy named in Griswold but on the concept of liberty itself. Kennedy's opinion said:

Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home. And there are other spheres of our lives and existence, outside the home, where the State should not be a dominant presence. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.

Kennedy is arguing that sodomy laws go far beyond simply violating a right to privacy; rather, they violate our right to liberty, to self-ownership, to our freedom to order our intimate relationships in the absence of a legitimate government interest in protecting the rights of others. In this regard, he was giving powerful expression to the best classical liberal traditions and to the concept of natural rights that underlies the Declaration of Independence and our most fundamental ideas of the nature of government and the nature of freedom. That someone who claims to support those principles to take a stand against this ruling only serves as a demonstration that they don't understand the ideas they claim to espouse.

After that, Brown goes off into a bizarre screed about a "worldwide movement that has successfully legalized adultery" around the world. It really has to be read to be believed:

This so called right does not actually exist within the U.S. Constitution but it does exist in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I suspicion that the United Nation's political and cultural agents known as the American Bar Association had something to do with the decision. This is a tentative suspicion based on their partnership with the U.N. and the Supreme Court admitting they ruled by international law in at least some cases.

I suspect that all of the justices on the Supreme Court belong to the ABA, including the ones who opposed the ruling. This is nothing more than a weird lumping together of all the right's bad guys into one big, unarticulared conspiracy to do what he doesn't like. And in this comment, he indicates that his claim about a "partnership" between the ABA and the UN is based on the fact that the ABA is listed as an NGO on the UN website. Then again, as he also noticed, even the Boy Scouts are listed as an NGA. Could that possibly be any more meaningless?

And from there, it just gets weirder. As evidence of a global conspiracy by the UN to get rid of laws against adultery, he actually cites two nations that made adultery illegal - Afghanistan under the Taliban and Cambodia under Pol Pot. Well those are good role models to have, but what on earth is the point? This all reminds me of the kind of whackos that call into late night shortwave radio programs, darkly intoning about rituals taking place in the catacombs beneath Jerusalem or about how the government has implanted listening devices in cockroaches or something. It's just plain weird.