In an update, Owen Courreges still avoids the issue. He writes that asking a public official about drug use is okay, but not about sex, because that’s more offensive. That sure seems weird to me.: you can ask about petty crimes, but not about really bad ones. But that issue is irrelevant. He also writes, “Sandefur’s problem spawns from the fact that he fallaciously believes that politeness is ruled by the ‘right to privacy.’ It isn’t.” It isn’t? Why not? What does rule politeness? Was it polite for the people of Texas to prosecute John Geddes Lawrence for private adult consensual sexual activity? Was it not “pretty brazen”? Was it not a “blatant violation of social decorum”? I always understood that the reason questions like this are inappropriate is because such things are a private matter, and are nobody else’s business. That, of course, is my point: we all have a right to privacy—a sphere of private activity where no other person has a right to intrude, either individually, by asking about our sexual lives, or en masse, by voting to illegalize aspects of our sexual lives. Owen Courreges, of course, does not believe this. He and Justice Scalia believe that private, adult, consensual sexual activity is a matter governmental regulation and therefore of public discussion. Given that premise, therefore, I’ve argued that it would be perfectly legitimate to ask Justice Scalia about his sexual practices. Why, I’ve asked, is it okay for the state to intrude into the bedrooms of homosexuals—as Justice Scalia believes—but not okay for a person to demand the details of Justice Scalia’s sexual practices? Why is it that a man who says he “do[es] not know what ‘acting in private’ means,” 539 U.S. at 597, has a right to privacy, but John Geddes Lawrence does not?
Owen Courreges has continued to refuse to answer these questions or explain. Instead, he says I’m being obtuse and a jerk and so forth, and mischaracterizes my statements, by saying that I think there’s nothing offensive about the question—when my whole point is that the question is deeply offensive and nobody should ask anyone questions like this. This, I think, is typical of the usual conservative attitude: homosexuals have no right to privacy, no right to demand politeness, no right to marry, no right to have their relationships taken seriously by heterosexuals. In the minds of many conservatives, heterosexual sex can be an intimate expression of love and the conversation of souls—but homosexual sex is just icky! and therefore not deserving of politeness, or rules of social decorum, or privacy, or any rights that a heterosexual man is bound to respect. Intruding on the privacy of heterosexuals is a blatant violation of social decorum, and intruding on the privacy of homosexuals is a legitimate state interest!
Update: Owen Courreges has never been able to defend his beliefs logically. Instead, he engages in the straw man, and of course, the evasion. He has never explained why it is wrong to ask Justice Scalia an offensive question, but okay to send armed agents of the state into people’s bedrooms to police their private, adult, consensual sexual activity. Instead, he says that I believe that the question to Justice Scalia was not offensive. I don’t know how to say more clearly that the question was deeply offensive and should never have been asked—at least as wrong as it was to send the police into John Geddes Lawrence’s bedroom. Mr. Courreges, however, wants one to be covered, and the other not.
Incidentally, Courreges says “Absent any reasonable suspicion, asking a person if they rape goats, look a child porn, or commit sodomy is inappropriate.” Well, of course that’s true. But we all do have a reasonable suspicion that Justice Scalia sodomizes his wife. A great many men of my acquaintance do (to their wives).* And if it is not off-limits to take John Geddes Lawrence to the witness chair about his sodomy, then cannot be off-limits to ask Justice Scalia this question.
Courreges cannot seriously misunderstand me, but I will try once more: the question was offensive. It is nobody’s business what Antonin Scalia does in the privacy of his bedroom. None whatsoever. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, and none of us therefore has the right to even inquire, let alone regulate, what goes on there. But the same holds true of John Geddes Lawrence. I might paraphrase Lincoln: I do not say that Mr. Lawrence is the equal of Justice Scalia in every respect. He is probably not his equal in moral and intellectual endowments. But in the right to do in the privacy of his bedroom what he wants with someone who consents, he is my equal, and the equal of Justice Scalia, and the equal of every other man!
*-for the few who may not know it, oral sex is sodomy, but, to be fair, was not outlawed by the Texas statute struck down in Lawrence.
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