Joe: I would like to do X, which is something that doesn’t harm anyone else.

Richard: Yeah, but I don’t like you doing X. It just bothers me. Therefore I’m going to force you to stop.

Judge Bill: Um, Richard, I’m sorry, you don’t have the right to interfere with Joe if he wants to do X.

Richard: Aaargh! Unelected judges taking away my freedom! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

Lincoln is best known for freeing the slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, affirming that all men are equal. Darwin is best known for the theory of evolution, arguing that all men are not equal because some are more evolved.

I have not seen or heard of a soul who is not with the North. Some few, & I am one, even and wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against Slavery. In the long run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity. What wonderful times we live in. Massachusetts seems to show noble enthusiasm. Great God how I should like to see the greatest curse on Earth Slavery abolished.

But if there is no God - then men are not only not "created," they are not "equal," as Darwin espoused, some are more evolved than others...This concept influenced the Dred Scott Case, 1856, which stated slaves "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken.

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.

I keep hearing how allowing gays to marry threatens marriage. Fine. Someone tell me how my marriage is directly threatened by two men marrying or two women marrying. Does their marriage make my marriage less legal? Does their love somehow compromise the love I feel for my wife, or she for me? Is the direct consequence of their marriage that my marriage and the commitment therein is manifestly lessened, compromised or broken? And if the answer to these questions is "no," as it is, exactly how is marriage threatened?...

The institution of marriage lies in the union of souls; to discuss marriage in general without acknowledging that it exists because of marriages in particular is a pointless exercise. If no single marriage is directly affected by two men or two women getting married -- if I and my neighbors and my family and friends and even my enemies are still well-ensconced in our individual marriages to our spouses -- how is the institution of marriage harmed? No harm has come to its constituents, who are the institution.

On what grounds do I as a married person tell others who want to be married that they are undeserving of the joy and comfort I've found in the married state? What right do I have morally to say that I deserve something that they do not? If I believe that every American deserves equal rights, equal protections and equal responsibilities and obligations under the law, how may I with justification deny my fellow citizens this one thing? Why must I be required to denigrate people I know, people I love and people who share my life to sequester away a right of mine that is not threatened by its being shared? Gays and lesbians were at my wedding and celebrated that day with me and my wife and wished us nothing less than all the happiness we could stand for the very length of our lives. On what grounds do I refuse these people of good will the same happiness, the same celebration, the same courtesy?

I support gay marriage because I support marriage. I support gay marriage because I support equal rights under the law. I support gay marriage because I want to deny those who would wall off people I know and love as second-class citizens. I support gay marriage because I like for people to be happy, and happy with each other. I support gay marriage because I love to go to weddings, and this means more of them. I support gay marriage because my marriage is strengthened rather than lessened by it -- in the knowledge that marriage is given to all those who ask for its blessings and obligations, large and small, until death do they part. I support gay marriage because I should. I support gay marriage because I am married.

The instant program is one of true private choice, consistent with the Mueller line of cases, and thus constitutional. It is neutral in all respects towards religion, and is part of Ohio's general and multifaceted undertaking to provide educational opportunities to children in a failed school district. It confers educational assistance directly to a broad class of individuals defined without reference to religion and permits participation of all district schools--religious or nonreligious--and adjacent public schools.

Actually, I tend to agree with the "presumption of constitutionality" interpretation. If we consider that "we the people" are sovereign (i.e., that sovereignty and thus the power of government is granted by the people, rather than derived from the king or the like), then arguably in a representative form of government (which is what we have), it is the voice of the collective as articulated by the legislative body which is the purest expression of the collective sovereign. The typical notion of "majority rules, minority rights" reflects this fact: namely, that the sovereign (the people) are capable of articulating what they believe to be appropriate legislation, and the best check on that unbridled power is the ability of the courts to review the legislative action to make certain it does not contravene some sort of protected right.

Although Congress has the power to change the Court's appellate jurisdiction (this is one side effect of Marbury v. Madison) it may not do so in ways that violate the First Amendment. In this case Congress has made a viewpoint based distinction. Actions which acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty or government" are shielded from judicial review, while actions which specifically (deny) "God as the sovereign source of law, liberty or government" may be reviewed under the Establishment Clause. Since both types of acts may in theory violate the Establishment Clause, the jurisdictional bar is based on the content of the government official's viewpoint. This would be akin to Congress denying review of cases where government officials punish someone on grounds of criticizing the war in Iraq while retaining review in cases where government officials punish someone for supporting the war, which would also be an unconstitutional withdrawal of jurisdiction.

I never cease to be amazed at how shameless politicians can be when trying to score political points with their constituents. Although the bill's sponsors claim that they are trying to restore the Constitution in the face of judges who have disregarded the basis of American constitutional government, in fact it is this statute itself which is blatantly unconstitutional and which shows utter disrespect for our constitutional system. The Senators and Congressmen who sponsored this bill should be ashamed of themselves. They swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. They are obviously unwilling to live up to that oath and therefore they should resign.

America's founders had a "deity-based" belief system. Why? Because:

1. Your rights cannot be taken away by the government if they come from a power "higher" than the government, i.e., God;

2. There are no second-class citizens if each person is equal because each is made in the image of God

But I must disagree with his response to Federer on the issue of the “deity-based belief system” of the founding fathers. Most of the founding fathers did, indeed, have a “deity-based” belief system, including such notable skeptics as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

But in the strictest sense of the term testability, a falsifiable prediction must be made in order for a scientific theory to be considered valid. Fair enough. So, although I am not associated with Reasons to Believe, I think I can make the following testable prediction from their model:

Further research will reveal function for so-called Junk-DNA sequences. Although considered by evolutionists to be a closed case, the Creation Model predicts that currently held scientific opinion on this issue will eventually concede that function is inherent in the Junk-DNA sequence. The failure of this test would be a devastating, if not killer, blow to the Creation Model.

duplication - modifications (mutations, insertions, deletions, frame shifts) to the DNA sequence of a gene can occur during duplication. These disablements can result in loss of gene function at the transcription or translation level (or both) since the sequence no longer results in the production of a protein. Copies of genes that are disabled in such a manner are termed non-processed or duplicated pseudogenes.

retrotransposition - reverse transcription of an mRNA transcript with subsequent re-integration of the cDNA into the genome. Such copies of genes are termed processed pseudogenes. These pseudogenes can also accumulate random disablements over the course of evolution.

In any study of molecular evolution, it is necessary to compare and contrast genes from a variety of organisms to gauge how the organisms have adapted to ensure their survival. Pseudogenes are vitally important since they provide a record of how the genomic DNA has been changed without such evolutionary pressure and can be used as a model for determining the underlying rates of nucleotide substitution, insertion and deletion in the greater genome.

Through migration and proliferation, transposable elements have become inordinately successful, and that is how they have come to constitute 40 percent of our DNA, either as active copies or dead ones. Much of the remaining junk DNA in our genome may also turn out to be former transposable elements that have mutated beyond recognition. In certain species the proportions are even more staggering: 99 percent of the lily genome consists of transposable elements.

Transposable elements also appear to play a crucial role in the evolution of the cell's "legitimate" genes. Genes can evolve only if they first mutate, and transposable elements create a significant fraction of a genome's mutations. Like other kinds of mutations, most of those caused by transposable elements are neutral or harmful, but some of them can do an organism good. Sometimes, for instance, these mobile genetic parasites drag a piece of a neighboring gene with them to their new home. In the process, they link two preexisting chunks of genes into a new combination that may quickly take on a new function.

Transposable elements themselves have even become vital parts of genes. About 500 million years ago, for example, a transposable element in the genome of early vertebrates was incorporated into a gene that became part of our immune system. This ex-parasite stopped using its DNA-splicing skills to replicate itself and instead began rearranging the genes that encode pathogen-recognizing proteins. Thanks to this transposable element, our immune cells can quickly generate millions of different-shaped proteins. Through a process much like natural selection, the cells with proteins that allow them to identify pathogens will survive and can then be made to alter their genes again to do an even better job. In other words, it is only thanks to an erstwhile parasite that we can fight off other parasites.

LINE is a specific kind of repeated element that consists of a reverse transcriptase that has copied itself into the genome. It has just copied itself over and over into the DNA.

They describe two "functions". One is titration: cells make decisions about
when to divide by measuring the nucleus:cytoplasm ratio. In this case, the junk is filler that is taken into account when determining when to divide. It's putting everything backwards, though: as clutter accumulated in the genome, the ratio set point for division shifted to compensate.

The other is the discovery of enzymes that recognize a LINE sequence. Again, this is an after-the-fact adaptation. Evolution is a process that will co-opt anything lying around, and so a function was found for a short stretch of junk in one chromosome. It's like the nylonase gene, which acquired its function by fortuitously acquiring a short piece of random DNA from the junk pile, or like found art, that uses useless, discarded crap for a new purpose.

He diagramed how bygone theologians began to accept evolutionary thought. Initially, they said they could accept the conclusion that the earth must be millions of years old. They concluded that this was all right – that doesn't affect the Bible in any way. But they had to subsequently reinterpret the six days of creation. So they placed millions of years or long ages between the days of creation. So the day-age theory came about, and then the gap theory, which placed millions of years between the first two verses of Genesis. And then theologians, now on an uncontrollable slippery slope, concluded that Darwinian evolution could be combined with biblical teaching.

When we compromise the ultimate truth of the Bible, chaos is the ultimate outcome.

"If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?" (Psalm 11:3)

These church leaders who allowed the notion of evolution to be combined with biblical teachings actually unlocked the door to undermine biblical authority, Mr. Ham said.

What is the forbidden construction? We all know the answer to that question. The forbidden construction says, "The first eight amendments enumerate certain rights. No other rights are enumerated. Because no other rights are enumerated, it follows that the constitution denies or disparages other rights which might have been retained by the people. If the people had wished to retain these other rights, they would have enumerated them." We know with absolute certainty that this is the construction which the text of the Ninth Amendment forbids, because this is the construction that is expressly negated by the text.

Of course, this textualist point does not provide us a construction of the Ninth Amendment. A construction of the Ninth Amendment requires more: it requires answers to the questions about the meaning of "deny or disparage," "rights," "retained rights," "retention by the people," and so forth. The textualist point does tell us how we must start our inquiry if we are to be faithful to the ideal of a written constitution that binds us to the text.

With the Supreme Court considering the Ninth Circuit Court ban on "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and refusing to hear the case about Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments Monument, perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at the First Amendment.

If the First Amendment read "Congress shall make no law respecting (regarding) jellybeans" there would be no question of the meaning.

It would be obvious that a law creating a federal jellybean monopoly would be a violation of the law. Everyone would understand that Congress could not tax jellybeans, regulate jellybeans, ban jellybeans, or even write a law defining jellybeans. The Constitution would clearly ban any Federal interference with state jellybean laws. It would also ban Federal interference with any personal use of jellybeans on public property.

This would be true only if we define what a legitimate government interest is...When the Court tried to avoid it, it simply assumes the answer: “whatever the people want.” But the Ninth Amendment indicates to us that that cannot be the correct answer, because there are other rights that the people retain.

What is a legitimate government interest? The Declaration of Independence tells us: “to secure these rights,” namely, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These things are not reasonably related to banning sneakers, and it is therefore unreasonable for the government to do that at all, even aside from the fact that Congress has no such enumerated power. The Ninth Amendment warns us against an expansive reading of federal power, because such an expansive reading will lead us into the losing game of asking the question in the terms of undefined “government interests.”

From the tenor of the discussion, Ed reminds me of me - way back in undergraduate school, after I'd taken a couple of constitutional law classes and everything seemed like a constitutional issue.

Here's the problem in a nutshell, inasmuch as the sneaker analogy goes. Congress could ban the sale and wearing of sneakers under its enumerated powers as long as there was some sort of legitimate governmental interest. If Congress conducted hearings and concluded that sneakers were somehow harmful, or it were possible to tie it to some governmental interest, such legislation would arguably pass constitutional muster - and there would be no "right" which it infringed.

I'm far more comfortable relying on courts than legislatures, especially given that the entire and proper role of the former is to act as the last line of defense against majoritarian abuses.

Is there any approach that will satisfy -- if not everybody -- at least most reasonable people?

Surprisingly, there is a way to teach evolution that will benefit students and satisfy all but the most extreme partisans and ideologues. Rather than ignoring the controversy (as many educators have tried to do), teachers should teach about the scientific controversy that now exists over Darwinian evolution.

When credible experts disagree about a controversial subject, students should learn about the competing perspectives.

In such cases, teachers should not teach as true only one competing view -- just the Republican or just the Democratic view of the New Deal in history class, for example. Instead, teachers should describe competing views to students and explain the arguments for and against these views as made by their chief proponents. We call this "teaching the controversy."

Cranks typically do not understand how the scientific process operates, that they need to try out their ideas on colleagues, attend conferences and publish their hypotheses in peer-reviewed journals before announcing to the world their startling discovery. Of course, when you explain this to them they say that their ideas are too radical for the conservative scientific establishment to accept.

(3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. The recognized societies refuse to let him lecture. The journals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to "enemies" for review. It is all part of a dastardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this opposition may be due to error in his work....

(4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein....

(5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.

Recently, more than 300 scientists, including professors from institutions such as MIT, Yale, Rice and the University of Georgia, signed a statement questioning the creative power of the selection/mutation mechanism.

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

The publications represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks), discuss problems that evolutionary theory faces, or suggest important new lines of evidence that biology must consider when explaining origins.

NCSE sent a questionnaire to the authors of every publication listed in the Bibliography, asking them whether they considered their work to provide scientific evidence for "intelligent design."[5] None of the 26 respondents (representing 34 of the 44 publications in the Bibliography) did; many were indignant at the suggestion. For example, Douglas H. Erwin (author of [8]), answered, "Of course not — [intelligent design] is a non sequitur, nothing but a fundamentally flawed attempt to promote creationism under a different guise. Nothing in this paper or any of my other work provides the slightest scintilla of support for 'intelligent design'. To argue that it does requires a deliberate and pernicious misreading of the papers."[6] Several respondents even went so far as to say that their work constituted scientific evidence against "intelligent design."

Similarly, on the basis of the explanation prefaced to the Bibliography, it would have been reasonable for the Board to assume that the publications included in the Bibliography challenged evolution. But they don't. None of the respondents to NCSE's questionnaire considered their work to provide scientific evidence against evolution. David M. Williams (coauthor of [18]), for example, simply remarked, "No, certainly not. How could it possibly?" Almost all of the respondents emphasized that their work provided scientific evidence for evolution. Kenneth Weiss (author of [21]), for example, remarked, "I state clearly that evolution is beyond dispute based on all the evidence I am aware of."

design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world...

If design theory is to make a contribution to science, it must be worth pursuing on the basis of its own merits, not as an exercise in Christian 'cultural renewal,' the weight of which it cannot bear.

I think part of Ed's issue is that he really doesn't understand what I'm saying, or that I'm not communicating it clearly enough... or a little of both. He seems to think that I'm advocating that we have no other rights other than those enumerated in the Constitution.

Well, NO, I wouldn't consider a law that banned the wearing of sneakers in the US unconstitutional. I would consider it a frivolous law without merit, but that's a far cry from attempting to tie it to a Constitutional right.

So we have a little problem here. If all rights not listed in the Constitution are covered anyway, and if those rights become Constitutional, then when a court declares that a slave owner has the right to own a slave because the slave is not a human but because he / it is the slave owner's property, what are we to do? The right is Constitutional - right? It must be inalienable - right? The court creates meaning - right? Wrong.

While original intent is a Pandora's Box that is really not worth bothering with, because a) times change, b) the Founders set up a system that allowed for the evolution of legal interpretation through the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and c) the Founders were such a broad, diverse, and compromising group it's impossible to determine what their "intent" on any single issue was in any manner even approaching precision, I would venture to file that they would support the right to privacy.

Scalia invokes originalist arguments when they support constitutional positions he agrees with; but when they would be an embarassment to the positions he likes, he says nothing about originalism, instead using fairly standard arguments based on precedent, social policy, and his favored values...

The problem is that originalists like Scalia do not consistently follow precedent when it conflicts with original understandings, nor do they consistently follow original understandings when they conflict with precedent. Rather, they pick and choose, depending on which constitutional rules they like better. It is unlikely that Scalia would vote to overturn Bolling v. Sharpe, but he would love to overturn precedents like Roe, Casey, Stenberg, Eisenstadt, and Carey [which guarantee rights of abortion and contraception]. He defers to previous precedent (or expands on it) when it suits him, and he waxes eloquent about returning to the original understanding when that suits him. And all the while he insists that people who disagree with him are making illegitimate arguments, and are imposing their personal preferences on the Constitution. The irony is that when originalism is opportunistically applied in the way that Scalia employs it, it allows judges to do pretty much the same thing as the judges that Scalia criticizes. In this sense, Scalia's brand of originalism fails to perform the very function he says it should perform: the function of constraining judges. Having seen Scalia's body of work since he joined the Court, I have no reason to believe that Scalia is any more constrained from pushing the Constitution in his preferred direction using an artful combination of textual, originalist, and precedental arguments than William Brennan was. Scalia is the living constitutionalist who dares not admit that his is a living constitutionalism of the right rather than of the left.

Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, said that when the court refused to update notions of fundamental liberty, the spirit of the Constitution's promises goes unfulfilled. Roosevelt said an 1873 case called Bradwell v. Illinois was a good example.

"In this case, an Illinois lawyer sued so she could become a member of the state bar, which didn't accept women," Roosevelt said. The 14th Amendment, which provides everyone with equal protection under the laws, had passed five years earlier. Still, the court ruled that the ban on female lawyers was OK, because the founders provided a woman "no legal existence" beyond her husband. The "paramount destiny and mission" of women was to be wives and mothers, the court said.

"Today, this would be a no-brainer violation of the 14th Amendment," Roosevelt said. "That's the way in which the change in societal attitudes should inform our interpretation of the Constitution."

The University of Tulsa's Finkelman said the 14th Amendment in particular was written to be open-ended. John Bingham, the Ohio congressman who was the amendment's primary author, once said its charm was its "indefiniteness," Finkelman said. More than 130 years later, many subsequent applications of the 14th Amendment seem obvious.

"The language of the amendment makes it inherently flexible," Finkelman said. "For example, at the time the 14th Amendment was written it was quite common to conduct a criminal trial without a lawyer representing the defendant. That was not considered a denial of due process of law. But today everyone, even Scalia, would accept the notion that a trial can't be fair if the defendant doesn't have an attorney."

As written, though, the FMA would make it impossible to create the type of civil unions FMA boosters like Ponnuru suggest they're open to. More broadly, it's unlikely that any amendment preventing courts from creating civil unions would make it possible for legislatures to do the same. Worse, not only would the FMA deny state legislatures the authority proponents claim it would leave intact; it would also constitute the kind of unprecedented assault on state autonomy conservatives reject in almost every other circumstance.>

There is another, subtler problem with the FMA's second sentence: It does not merely limit and constrain state laws. It dictates a rule about how state laws and state constitutions will be construed and interpreted by the state's own courts. That is an unprecedented intrusion into the autonomy of the states' legal systems. Instead of limiting state law with federal law, from the outside, it would distort state law from within...

But meddling for the first time in how states interpret their own statutes and constitutions isn't a marginal change. It's a change in the basic status of state constitutions and legal systems. That's because state constitutional provisions can mean something different from their federal counterparts, even when they use precisely the same wording. Among other things, state-level precedent and the different overall constitutional structure in whose light provisions must be interpreted allow state legal systems to develop in ways more protective of individual rights than the federal system. Guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to keep arms, privacy and property rights, and, yes, equal protection clauses can all be construed more expansively in a given state than they are at the federal level--a fact that matters dearly to conservative defenders of federalism. For those who care about federalism as an institution for protecting freedom--a description most conservatives would assent to--federal intervention in state constitutional development is a dangerous precedent, imperiling precisely these rights.

The FMA was oddly written in an attempt to meet social conservative aims under cover of shoring up the separation of powers and respecting federalist principles--and while avoiding the appearance of extremism that would be created by banning civil unions altogether. The attempt to do all this simultaneously failed. We're left with an amendment that achieves social conservative aims by subverting both the separation of powers and federalism. In this case, a bad cause seems to have made for bad law.

There are at least two things that should be addressed here: 1) The inherent difference between enumerated rights in the Constitution and all other rights, and 2) the double-speak regarding author’s intentions and how to interpret the meaning of a text.

The examples listed of rights we enjoy, but which have not been enumerated in the Constitution, do not reveal valid rights inasmuch as they reveal the rulings of judges. They remain and will always remain the opinions of the court...

Rulings are fallible – inalienable rights are not.

(1) The right to retain American citizenship, despite even criminal activities, until explicitly and voluntarily renouncing it (Afroyim v. Rusk, 1967);

(2) The right to receive equal protection not only from the states but also from the federal government (Bolling v. Sharpe, 1954; Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 1975; Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 1995);

(3) The right to vote, subject only to reasonable restrictions to prevent fraud, and to cast a ballot in equal weight to those of other citizens (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Gray v. Sanders, 1963; Wesberry v. Sanders, 1964; Reynolds v. Sims, 1964; Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 1966; Rogers v. Lodge, 1982);

(4) The right to presumption of innocence and to demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt before being convicted of a crime (In re Winship, 1970; Estelle v. Williams, 1976; Taylor v. Kentucky, 1978; Sandstrom v. Montana, 1979; Jackson v. Virginia, 1979);

(5) The right to use the federal courts and other governmental institutions and to urge others to use these processes to protect their interests (Slaughter-House Cases, 1873; NAACP v. Button, 1963);

(6) The right to associate with others (De Jonge v. Oregon, 1937; NAACP v. Alabama, 1958);

(7) The right to enjoy a zone of privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965);

(8) The right to travel within the United States (Crandall v. Nevada, 1868; Shapiro v. Thompson, 1969);

(9) The right to marry or not to marry (Loving v. Virginia, 1967; Zablocki v. Redhail, 1978);

(10) The right to make one's own choice about having children (Griswold; Eisenstadt v. Baird, 1972; Carey v. Population Services, 1977; Roe v. Wade, 1973);

(11) The right to educate one's children as long as one meets certain minimum standards set by the state (Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925);

(12) The right to choose and follow a profession (Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 1897; Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923; Gibson v. Berryhill, 1973);

(13) The right to attend and report on criminal trials (Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, 1980)

What happens when this right to privacy is attached to the act of abortion? A new “right” suddenly emerges, popping into existence at the judge’s bidding – the so-called Woman’s Right to Choose (to end the life of her unborn child).

This leads into the sloppy interpretive skills within analyses such as those of Ed and Kyle. With regards to specific issues we are told that it is impossible to know the intent of the framer’s of the Constitution. It appears that he attempts to get around this self-imposed hurdle by referring to an implied intent that the courts have found or construed. But this just raises another hurdle for only the author of the text can imply intentions within his text. Either the intent is there or it is not...Like it or not, the Constitution is not living – it is static. It says what it says and no amount of legalistic gyrations can make it say anything more or anything less.

We definitely arent looking for some legislation to support our views, or anything like that. What our adversaries would like to say is - these people want to impose their views through the law - No' that's what they do. We're against that in principle and we dont need that.