When it comes to rights, leftists are always quick to invent them to further their selfish desires. In an opinion essay published in the Fish Wrapper entitled A tribute to Justice Louis Brandeis (and entitled "For privacy rights, thank Justice Brandeis" in the DFW), Daniel Schorr from NPR (or NLR, for National Leftist Radio, as I like to call it), pays tribute to the man who invented a right that doesn't exist:

If he is remembered for nothing else, he will be remembered for discovering a constitutional right to privacy, which became the underpinning of the right to an abortion.

It's an interesting choice of words that he uses; Brandeis "discovered" the "right to privacy". The problem is that the word discover indicates finding something that already existed:

to see, get knowledge of, learn of, find, or find out; gain sight or knowledge of (something previously unseen or unknown): to discover America; to discover electricity.

This right doesn't exist in the Constitution, not even the Bill of Rights. Instead, it was invented. Regis Nicoll documents the evolution of this "right":

It surprises many to learn that although U.S. Constitution contains certain protections from unreasonable searches and seizures, it includes no explicit right of privacy. Nevertheless, a modern doctrine of privacy began in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut. In that case, the Supreme Court determined that marital privacy was a liberty guaranteed under the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights, making laws that banned contraception unconstitutional.

By 1973 (Roe v. Wade), the Court ruled that “This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Privacy, thus expanded, led to the legalization of abortion at the cost of four thousand children per day. But by 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey), the Court declared this right so sacred that a woman was not compelled to even inform the baby’s father of her intent.

As appalling as that decision was, more troubling was the majority opinion rendered by Justice Kennedy: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Although no one but Big Brother would suggest we shouldn’t have the freedom to hold our own understandings about life, Kennedy’s implication is that actions derived from those understandings should be exempt from governmental interference. Taken to its logical end, Kennedy’s opinion is moral chaos.

Little wonder that the “sweet mystery of life” (as it’s been called) led to our next descent. In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Court broadened the right of privacy to include the sexual activities of consenting adults, regardless of gender or marital status. Ruling that a Texas law forbidding sexual intimacy between same-sex persons was unconstitutional, the Court stated, “[The] Petitioners’ right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention.”

In a span of less than forty years, the explicit protections of the Constitution swelled into an absolute right of private conduct. In effect, the Courts declared that what happens behind closed doors between consenting adults, and what one does with one’s body and the life growing inside it, is nobody’s business.

So, thanks to this invented right, we now have things like abortion on demand and legal sodomy (thanks to the Lawrence decision). And we keep heading down this slippery slope:

If the right to privacy protects adults engaged in private, consensual sex, how are we going to outlaw polygamy? The polygamist and all of his wives practice private, consensual sex.

How are we going to maintain laws against incest? It's private, consensual sexual behavior in the security of one's own bedroom. Why stop a forty-year-old man having sex with his consenting nineteen-year-old daughter-or son? And why stop siblings as long as there's consent?

And what about pedophilia that's "consensual," or "intergenerational intimacy," as the North American Man-Boy Love Association calls it?

One even has to raise the question of bestiality. Peter Singer, the eminent bioethicist at Princeton, argues that animals can consent since consent needn't be verbal.

I could go on and on about this topic, but I shall close by saying that instead of celebrating, we should be mourning Judge Brandeis' invention, because he has opened up a Pandora's box that has cost millions of deaths of unborn children among other things.