Roe v. Wade: The anniversary came and went unremarked by me. In fact, I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out. It's an anniversary worth noting, though, since it is an anniversary of stupidity. I agree with those who say that the country was on the road to an accomodation over abortion. The intervention of the judiciary simply injected adrenaline into the heart of the debate. It's a ruling that I don't fully understand. The Constitution would seem to make it totally a state matter; in fact, the only rationale I can find for federal judicial intervention is on the anti-abortion side (to wit: that the fetus is human and thus protected by Constitutional rights). I'm not sure I agree with that, but it does seem to touch upon Constitutional issues more directly than a woman's right to abort a fetus.

Okay, you got your right to privacy pretty well established by Griswold, but what the hell does that matter anymore? If the body is sacrosanct, NARAL should be out on the streets marching for my right to shoot heroin. After all, what business is it of the government's what I do with my own body? Clearly, a right to privacy that extends so far is not settled law, no matter how much we might like it to be. Besides, when I shoot smack, it isn't with the intention to kill a human being.** So by some pretty obvious logic, drug use rights -- resting on the same principles, but lacking the added moral freight that ending a life brings to abortion -- should be more of a legal slam dunk than abortion rights. Call me when the judiciary and the DOJ figure this out.

** Sidebar: The pro-choice side really needs to get over this, by the way; "kill" is the proper and accurate word for subtracting the "living" from "living being." Their problem is not that they want abortion legal. It's that they want this one free; they want it to be not only legal but also morally neutral to abort -- i.e., it's not "killing" and/or it's not a "human." This is what happens when liberalism is your religion; the government becomes your confessor. I say it should be legal, at least at the state level, but that doesn't make the morality of it clear cut.