The Irony of the Right to Privacy

This is a classic segment from John Stewart.



The stalker producer stuff is hysterical, but the irony of Bill O'Reilly's statements has really be getting to me lately.

Firstly, the fact that Bill O'Reilly acknowledges the right to privacy while remaining openly anti-choice is not only ironic, it's absurd. The unenumerated right to privacy is either recognized or not. Since it isn't enumerated, its clear that there's an argument against it, but it's not possible to argue that the right does exists while, simultaneously, not protecting a woman's right to choose.

Now, the claim for fetal rights in this particular instance offers a fair claim, and this is where I really draw the line between religiosity and secularism in debate. If an anti-choice individual believes that life begins at conception, that a sole is injected into the egg alongside the sperm (or somesuch) then it follows that this should be protected as a human life. If you understand that the early collection of cells have no consciousness, no independence and are fewer in number than the cells of a mosquito, then it follows that society should not intervene.

My position is different.

My position, constitutionally, is that it is not the place of the government to make decisions about things that an individual is and is not allowed to do with respect to their body. There should be no federal regulation of "victimless crime."

That's my opinion.

This hinges less on an unenumerated right to privacy and more on the enumerated powers, and definitive role, of the government.

The role of the government should be to preserve freedom, not to restrict it based on puritanism. If O'Reilly, and others (on all sides of these debates) acknowledge a right to privacy, then it is only fair that they should focus on what that right entails, and O'Reilly should acknowledge that his position is a theological one, not one based in Constitutional law.

NOTE: The dynamics of Roe v. Wade, which I get asked about all the time, are an issue for me. I do really feel that it was a tenth amendment issue, and that there was a strong, legitimate legal argument for upholding the state ban on abortion. At the same time, there was a part of me that was glad to see the doctrine of unenumerated rights engaged, because I do think that is the purpose of the Ninth Amendment.