It looks like gun control doesn’t work very well in Iraq, either. Where should we try it next? I imagine it could get a damn-near 100% success rate in Antarctica.

The jihad has claimed another member. Molly has moved to a new site. I’m sure Kevin will be pleased to add another name to the list.

Only this time, it wasn’t Dowd herself, but Dowd-wannabe John W. Porter
of the Portland (ME) Press-Herald. This from yesterday’s piece (hat tip: James Taranto) first misquotes Justice Antonin Scalia, and then engages in the very bigotry of which he accused Scalia.

What sets the issue off so well is what he adds just a few paragraphs later. “Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals,” he says.

Really?

Actually, no, not really.

(more…)

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is not happy with the ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws in Texas and 12 other states. Neither am I. My views on the matter are pretty well summed up by Clarence Thomas’s brief dissenting opinion, which reads as follows:

I join Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinion. I write separately to note that the law before the Court today “is … uncommonly silly.” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 527 (1965) (Stewart, J., dissenting). If I were a member of the Texas Legislature, I would vote to repeal it. Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources.

Notwithstanding this, I recognize that as a member of this Court, I am not empowered to help petitioners and others similarly situated. My duty, rather, is to “decide cases ‘agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States.’” Id., at 530. And, just like Justice Stewart, I “can find [neither in the Bill of Rights nor any other part of the Constitution a] general right of privacy,” ibid., or as the Court terms it today, the “liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions,” ante, at 1.

(more…)