Griswold, Grrr

What added fuel to the brouhaha about Ms. Miers nomination, is that she claimed to have a different view of Griswold's position on privacy than Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Having so stated, her constitutional credentials were subsequently impugned.

If this is how highly placed lawyers of wide and diverse legal experience can be so easily relegated to the status of mindless naifs, what about us poor citizenry? Is our constitution so abstruse that we dare not attempt to understand it? Have we decerebrate non-legals been dispatched to the sheep pen, to be herded and condescended to by an elite group of self-anointed "legal" shepherds?

Here in basic English is what the Supreme Court decided on 6.7.1965

(Dissenters ~ Hugo Black and Potter Stewart)

"Though the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth and Ninth Amendments, create a new constitutional right, the right to privacy in marital relations. The Connecticut statute conflicts with the exercise of this right and is therefore null and void."

The Court rightly ruled that Connecticut had no authority to enact a statute that forbids married people from seeking contraceptive advice, especially in the privacy of their own home. But to claim to see a new right to privacy in marital relations by simply superimposing several amendments upon each other, is a stretch for any mortal imagination.

Was Griswold v. Connecticut a judicial epiphany? To me it was an exercise in convoluted logic. For the Court to have extracted certitude from penumbras, is not unlike a magician pulling a rabbit from an empty hat. I believe the framers prudently refrained from cluttering the constitution with universally accepted common law. They surely knew that from its remotest days in the caves, humanity never had any problem in defining and enjoying natural and mutually respected parameters of general privacy.

Privacy, privacy, what penumbrous travesties thy name embraces!