On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:13:08 -0500, "Vito" wrote:

"Dave" wrote
Far from a "curious notion," Marshall's opinion in Marbury v. Madison is
little more than a rewrite of a portion of one of Hamilton's Federalist
papers. The problem is not in the principle of the case--that if there is
a
conflict between a statute and the Constitution the Constitution prevails.
It's in the application of that principle that allowed the Court to find
in
the Constitution whatever the majority of the nine wise men thought was a
good idea, and to "discover" rights hidden but never articulated in the
"penumbra" of the text.

The foundation of the country, the Declaration of Independence, predates the
Constitution and emphatically states that we hold certain things to be self
evident - that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable
rights.

The Court didn't "discover" anything. They looked at both the Constitution
and Common Law and reasonably decided that one of our inalienable rights is
the right to privacy.

AFAIK the court never said you have a right to have sex with a sheep, it
said that the Government could not violate your privacy to catch you.

Where do you find federal supreme court protection for a right to
privacy? There are huge numbers of areas where the government goes
out of its way to violate privacy in order to enforce victimless crime
laws and very rarely is this reigned in on the grounds of privacy.
Some sex laws were struck down because of equal protection issues -
where gays were prosecuted for something straights weren't prosecuted
for.

Some states have asserted on the state level a right to privacy, most
notably Alaska did this in the late 70's or early 80's to say that
marijuana use in the home was not the business of the state.