The Georgetown Skank & the Pursuit of Horniness

Some scattered brain droppings to get us started:

The following is either paraphrased or a direct quote from Maritain: Each genuine science has its own distinctive light, corresponding to the formal principles by which it attains its object, or makes the object known.

Now, there are also supernatural principles, and these are made known by the light of faith. For there is an "object of pure intelligence" that cannot present itself to us -- or which we cannot make known to ourselves -- in any other way. We must meet it on its home turf, not ours.

There are necessary truths accessible to our reason. To the extent that one denies truths that compel our assent -- such as that the world is intelligible and that truth exists -- one is floating about the earth untethered to anything but the winds of opinion, fashion, preference -- in a word, desire.

What do these ethereal thoughts have to do with, like, anything -- you know, important stuff, like whether it is true that the Constitution forces us to subsidize the hysteromaniacal sex life of some Georgetown skank?

Glad you raised that point, because it is a perfect example of the distinction between a legal system rooted in principle and one based upon getting laid.

Call me an old-fashioned liberal, but it never occurred to me that one of the state's enumerated powers is to assure me abundant sex without consequences. Indeed, if the government were in charge of sex, then I'm sure that all women would look like DMV clerks, or maybe Miss Fluke herself (that's the DMV clerk on the left).

I know what you're thinking: Bob, you silly assoul, you never attended law school! What makes you think you understand the Constitution?

Fair question, but I've done some research, and it turns out that this Constitution thingy wasn't actually ratified by the Harvard Law School faculty.

Rather, it was presented for approval to the people, who are its author and its source. Our Constitution is sovereign over the people only to the extent that we are sovereign over it.

I know. Weird!

And of course, we can only be sovereign over it to the extent that we are sovereign over ourselves. But it sounds to me like the Georgetown Skank has no such auto-sovereignty, because you've got to be either really stupid or quite the bimbo -- or maybe just Paris Hilton -- to spend a thousand dollars a year on birth control.

I'll be frank: back when I was in college, I was never that lucky. Nor is it any measure of Cupid's favor to end up in the sack with the indiscriminate Miss Fluke. Rather, if one attends Georgetown -- or maybe just lives in the greater Georgetown area -- that is inevitable.

In fact, having sex three times a day for three years is beyond lucky. Rather, it's a compulsion. So does Obamacare cover the Georgetown Skank's sexual addiction? Because if she doesn't get treated, I don't know how she's ever going to graduate. Unless she's sleeping with her professors. Right.

Besides, if she wants to screw that many people, why not do it the old-fashioned way, by getting a judicial appointment?

About the question of law reducing to libido, or desire. That's no gag, because as Arkes points out, constitutional law took a one hundred eighty degree turn with the Griswold case of 1965.

In fact, you might say that it took a three hundred sixty degree turn, in the sense that it represented a "new start" for the forces that had been trying to undermine the Constitution for decades.

Griswold is only superficially about birth control. Rather, it simply used that as a pretext to usher in a new epoch of state intrusion into our lives. As Arkes explains, Griswold and Roe have become "the new touchstones in our jurisprudence," to such an extent that "any theory, any doctrine, of the law" which yields "the 'wrong' result" is "instantly marked as suspect or invalid."

In other words, instead of using the powers of deduction to apply constitutional principles to individual cases, we have a new standard that insists that we must toss out the principle if it clashes with the desires of the new vulgarians. For example, if I don't want the states to legislate abortion, then I conjure a constitutional reason to make it illegal for states to do so. That's what you call conjurisprudence.

Arkes says that "It could hardly be an overstatement then to say that Griswold and Roe mark the center, the core, of liberal jurisprudence in our own time."

The irony, of course, is that in reality the state -- the state, of all things! -- couldn't care less about your privacy. For example, it can reach into your wallet and force you to buy products you don't want and enter contracts you'd rather not.

But even leaving Obamacare to the side, have you ever been audited by the IRS? I mean, not over some small error, but the full proctological exam? That's when you find out that your privacy is a joke. And, for that matter, that you are guilty until proven innocent.

Another irony is that, in order to force the New Deal and Great Society upon us, the court had to take an entirely different tack prior to Griswold. Otherwise, how does one justify the huge expansion of state power to regulate every aspect of our economic behavior? Protest to FDR that you have a right to privacy -- for example, that you are free to charge as much as you want for a fucking chicken -- and you would have been arrested and tried.

But choking your chicken?

No, that's a poor example. Statists want to get involved in that activity as well.