Sex, Guns, Drugs and Abortion

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Krazy, Man: Sex, Guns, and Drugs

Curious readers may already have begun to scratch their heads. How on earth could sex, guns, and drugs combine to lay out the theme of a column? No, it is not a description of last Saturday night. It is instead about one word: rights. The varying ways that our default culture views each of these items in relation to rights says volumes about the rather odd place we have stumbled into as we break the seal on a new century.

For starters, only one of these things is explicitly protected as a "right" by the Constitution – that, of course, being guns. Yet as far as the culture is concerned, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is of far less importance to us than any of the other two. This illustrates a profound confusion that is one of the building blocks of the krazy house that is modern liberalism.

It has often been commented that the notion of "rights" in our society has been diluted to an almost meaningless degree. Less often commented on is the reason why. The root problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Constitution is, what it means, and why it exists. The Constitution is not a plan for a "good society". It has been much more accurately described as an architectural document. It is a design for building a democratic republic that is capable of withstanding the storms of passion, the winds of demagoguery and the buffeting of a fickle public. Although built on a foundation of natural law, the Constitution is a morally neutral entity. It judges not whether guns are good things or evil things, it simply says that allowing the government to disarm the public is detrimental to the maintenance of democracy and an invitation to despotism. A corollary argument is that issues of rights, properly understood, are the proper domain of the courts, while discussion of whether particular policies are wise are properly the domain of the peoples’ elected representatives.

Any discussion of policy in the context of "rights" must therefore be split into two separate questions. The first is "Does the government have the Constitutional Authority to do this thing?" If the answer to that is "Yes", the second question then becomes, "Is it wise for the government to do this thing?" The overwhelming temptations, especially for liberals (although conservatives are not immune) is to leap right to the second part of the equation, thinking it is actually the first part. This is the source of "judicial activism", which in essence is the stealing by the courts of issues properly left to the legislative domain.

With this in mind, let us look at each of the areas described above to see just how far off base we have gotten.

Sex. This is a huge umbrella category, but the thrust of modern liberalism is to deny government any role in defining sexual behavior. From Gay "rights" to abortion "rights" the language of sex has become suffused with the silly notion that sexual behavior is on par with political speech as a protected right. Yet the view of the Constitution laid out above makes it easy to see how ridiculous this is. Whether we celebrate homosexual behavior, for example, or punish it with prison terms has no bearing on the viability of American democracy. Because any sexual issue short of masturbation is by definition a social act, and because virtually no sexual issue has constitutional ramifications, it is precisely the sort of thing that must be left to the give and take of democratic debate. The arrogance of activist judges - from Griswold v. Connecticut through Roe v. Wade to the Vermont Supreme Court’s recent decision on homosexual marriage – is not only confused, it is patently un-constitutional and arguably a significant threat to our democracy. Our current approach to deciding sexual issues is an excellent example of the first sort of kraziness we have waded into. We are never even permitted to get to the second question - "is it wise?" - because undemocratic judges have decided that we cannot be trusted to arrive at the right answer.

Guns. Our attitudes toward guns and gun control are almost the opposite of sex. Those debating gun control glance away from the Constitution, preferring to focus only on discussing what is wise, pretending that the Constitutional issues simply don’t exist. But they do, and while we as a society may find that we no longer see an unarmed public as a threat to democracy, we are duty-bound to back up and address the constitutional issue squarely - we must change the Constitution . Once we have done so, then we may address the issues of what is wise in the way of managing and controlling firearms. To leap to the second question without addressing the first is to declare the Constitution to be a meaningless scrap of old paper.

Drugs. The third kind of kraziness can be illustrated by drug policy. This is actually the only one of the three that is konstitutionally konsistent. (Sorry, unexpected alliteration attack). Virtually nobody argues that the right to ingest drugs has any bearing on the ability to maintain a republican democracy. Our debate is properly focussed on what is wise policy. But the insanity of a nationalized "war on drugs" makes it clear that even following the proper process is no guarantee that we will arrive at good answers. I would argue that any policy that makes criminals out of a significant chunk of the American public (at least 10-20%) is inherently bad law and more damaging to society than anything done by legalizing self-destruction. While I think that our current drug policy is krazy, I feel no temptation to declare heroin use a constitutionally protected "privacy right".

This, in essence, draws the line between the conservative and liberal worldviews. Conservatives (most of them, anyway) are willing to live with a good process that results in a krazy policy. Because the process is in most ways more important than the policy. To a good liberal this is anathema. They cannot tolerate the notion that a good process can result in bad decisions. So they recast the very notion of rights to avoid the process altogether, and in the process slowly shred the notion of republican democracy.