While this is a very long and detailed response, you haven't actually answered my question.
There is a lot of similarity between laws banning (or regulating) contraceptives and laws banning sodomy -- similarity in terms of why legislatures pass those kinds of laws, similarity in terms of how often people are arrested or prosecuted for violating them, and similarity in terms of what effect they have on the sex lives of people who intend to violate them.
When I saw that quote, I realized that is the basic problem with both laws against contraceptives and laws against sodomy: those laws are so strict that law enforcement officials (like cops and public prosecutors) don't want to enforce them, and when people see that those laws are not being seriously enforced, then if they want to violate those laws, they can go right ahead and do so virtually all they want, because there is no realistic reason to fear that they might be arrested or prosecuted for doing so (except in some rare circumstances that I'll discuss below). That's why these kinds of laws are so insignificant.
I fundamentally disagree that there is no realistic reason to fear that they may be arrested for this. But it doesn't matter how "reasonable" those fears are or aren't, because that's not how rights work.
(I don't actually agree with Bork that there is no constitutional way to justify the conclusion in Skinner. There are two other ways to come to the same conclusion that the Court, as a whole, did in that case without distorting the meaning of the Constitution. Chief Justice Harlan Stone wrote a concurring opinion to Skinner, explicitly disagreeing with Douglas's stated doctrine, but finding that Oklahoma would violate Mr. Skinner's right to procedural due process if it sterilized him. And another way to come to a valid conclusion that the Oklahoma statute was unconstitutional would be to cite the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Punishing someone for multiple counts of felony larceny by sterilizing them is a form of punishment that goes much too far; the punishment is too severe in proportion to the crime that was committed. That was a legal argument that Skinner's attorney made to the Supreme Court, as Douglas's opinion explicitly acknowledged, but Douglas passed over that legal argument in favor of a different way of creating a new doctrine that isn't in the Constitution.)
I probably would've gone with the Cruel and Unusual Punishment argument if I were a judge, but I still don't see why the reasoning that the majority used was bad. I'd like to know why you think it was a bad decision.
Not only is all of this very important -- the deformation of the Constitution by sly tricks -- regardless of whether the particular issue IS important, such as sterilization, or as unimportant as rarely enforced laws about contraceptives and sodomy, but I also got very, very angry at Justice Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence because it was chock full of flat-out LIES and displays of HYPOCRISY. Those lies and hypocrisy were very similar to what Kennedy had written in Romer v. Evans, a decision that also made me extremely angry, so when Romer served as a precedent that led to Lawrence, what I saw was Kennedy compounding more lies (in Lawrence) on top of lies he had already written (in Romer). However, in order for me to spell out all of the lies in those two opinions, I would have to make this whole post five or more times longer than it already is.
I doubt it will produce anything of substance, but sure. In your long response, you still haven't actually explained
why you think
Lawrence is a bad legal decision.
Poll
