Bryan Fischer
ACLU: Gay sex in public restrooms a constitutional right
By Bryan Fischer
The ACLU has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Sen. Larry Craig, who has been engaged in protracted legal machinations to keep the issue of his guilt in an airport sex sting tied up in courts. All this is in an apparent effort to save face, stave off a Congressional investigation, and generate some thin justification for staying in office to the end of his term.
However, thanks to the law of unintended consequences, the main thing the senator has managed to do is create an opportunity for the ACLU to think up new and creative kinds of constitutional mischief.
The ACLU's brief is predicated on the premise that the senator was in fact soliciting for gay sex last summer in a Minneapolis airport restroom, which won't make the senator very happy since he has spent the last five months trying to withdraw his guilty plea for doing that very thing.
Problematically, the ACLU argues that the senator was in fact entitled to engage in gay sex with a willing partner in a public restroom stall, since people who use such restrooms have, according to a 38-year-old Minnesota Supreme Court ruling, "a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Never mind that, according to a legal analyst on Fox News, the 1970 ruling had to do only with prohibiting police from installing surveillance cameras that could peek into bathroom stalls, thus spying on ordinary citizens doing nothing more than answering a call of nature. The court correctly ruled that citizens should have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when using a bathroom for its intended purpose.
The court emphatically did not say that citizens using public restrooms as instant love nests were entitled to the same protection.
The ACLU says that the intimacy the senator expected to engage in "would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom," an assertion which is ludicrous on its face. Sexual activity in public restrooms has been banned precisely because it cannot be effectively concealed and because it is in fact disturbing to other members of the public and to their children.
The city of Boise, for instance, had to enact a special ordinance because homosexual encounters in public park bathrooms were becoming such a nuisance to families using the park system.
It's difficult to know what part of the word "public" in the phrase "public restroom" the ACLU does not understand.
Since, in the ACLU's twisted view, private homosexual sex, even in a bathroom stall, is a lawful act (perhaps alluding to the fantastically misguided Lawrence decision of 2003), then soliciting for it (which the ACLU calls a form of protected speech) cannot itself be unlawful.
No court, however, should even allow the ACLU to cite the First Amendment's freedom of speech plank, for the simple reason that the Founders were seeking to protect political speech, not solicitation for gay sex.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote a Virginia law that specified castration as the punishment for homosexual behavior, would roll over in his own Memorial to see the Constitution bastardized in this way.
But thanks to egregious judicial activism, we are now just one renegade judge away from having gay sex in a public restroom magically transformed into a constitutional right. And if that happens, the families of America will have the ACLU and a senator from Idaho to thank.
© Bryan Fischer
The ACLU has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Sen. Larry Craig, who has been engaged in protracted legal machinations to keep the issue of his guilt in an airport sex sting tied up in courts. All this is in an apparent effort to save face, stave off a Congressional investigation, and generate some thin justification for staying in office to the end of his term.
However, thanks to the law of unintended consequences, the main thing the senator has managed to do is create an opportunity for the ACLU to think up new and creative kinds of constitutional mischief.
The ACLU's brief is predicated on the premise that the senator was in fact soliciting for gay sex last summer in a Minneapolis airport restroom, which won't make the senator very happy since he has spent the last five months trying to withdraw his guilty plea for doing that very thing.
Problematically, the ACLU argues that the senator was in fact entitled to engage in gay sex with a willing partner in a public restroom stall, since people who use such restrooms have, according to a 38-year-old Minnesota Supreme Court ruling, "a reasonable expectation of privacy."
Never mind that, according to a legal analyst on Fox News, the 1970 ruling had to do only with prohibiting police from installing surveillance cameras that could peek into bathroom stalls, thus spying on ordinary citizens doing nothing more than answering a call of nature. The court correctly ruled that citizens should have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when using a bathroom for its intended purpose.
The court emphatically did not say that citizens using public restrooms as instant love nests were entitled to the same protection.
The ACLU says that the intimacy the senator expected to engage in "would not have called attention to itself in a closed stall in the public restroom," an assertion which is ludicrous on its face. Sexual activity in public restrooms has been banned precisely because it cannot be effectively concealed and because it is in fact disturbing to other members of the public and to their children.
The city of Boise, for instance, had to enact a special ordinance because homosexual encounters in public park bathrooms were becoming such a nuisance to families using the park system.
It's difficult to know what part of the word "public" in the phrase "public restroom" the ACLU does not understand.
Since, in the ACLU's twisted view, private homosexual sex, even in a bathroom stall, is a lawful act (perhaps alluding to the fantastically misguided Lawrence decision of 2003), then soliciting for it (which the ACLU calls a form of protected speech) cannot itself be unlawful.
No court, however, should even allow the ACLU to cite the First Amendment's freedom of speech plank, for the simple reason that the Founders were seeking to protect political speech, not solicitation for gay sex.
Thomas Jefferson, who wrote a Virginia law that specified castration as the punishment for homosexual behavior, would roll over in his own Memorial to see the Constitution bastardized in this way.
But thanks to egregious judicial activism, we are now just one renegade judge away from having gay sex in a public restroom magically transformed into a constitutional right. And if that happens, the families of America will have the ACLU and a senator from Idaho to thank.
© Bryan Fischer
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