Obscenity: The New Invasion of Privacy?
Family Research Council,
July 25, 2003
By Colin Stewart, Executive Vice President
In the brief time since the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Lawrence
v. Texas, gay activists have used the case to push for same-sex
marriage in several states across the nation. Now, a lawyer from Ohio known
for defending the likes of porn-pusher Larry Flynt, has filed suit to have
Ohio’s obscenity law struck down based on the Lawrence ruling. Citing
the so-called “Due Process Right to Privacy,” which the Supreme Court
invented 30 years ago to justify abortion and has now expanded to endorse the
gay agenda, attorney H. Louis Sirkin is arguing that there is a
constitutionally protected right to buy, sell and own obscenity.
“Practically all choices made by consenting adults regarding their own
sexual practices [are] a matter of personal liberty and thus beyond the reach
of state control,” Sirkin is quoted as saying in The Washington Times.
As absurd as his claims are, they exemplify the sort of problems Justice
Antonin Scalia warned would follow the Court’s wrongheaded ruling in Lawrence.
Though obscenity destroys families, fuels pedophiles and rapists, and though
it enjoys no constitutional protection, the Court’s decision has called into
question virtually all laws that would uphold public morality. Ohio state
attorneys promise to vigorously defend their state’s obscenity laws. We
certainly hope that the judges hearing this case will take the correct
position that the Constitution is worth protecting and obscenity is worth
destroying—not vice versa.
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