A Constitutional Right To Solicit Sex In The Men's Room

A Constitutional Right To Solicit Sex In The Men's Room

The ACLU has once again done a fine job of combining a series of fairly reasonable decisions into a completely absurd result. Here's their amicus brief in support of my U.S. Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig.

The short version is this:

1. There is a constitutional right to have homosexual sex in private places. (Of course, this is the core error, as I point out here.)

2. If action X is legal to do in private, then soliciting someone to go somewhere in private to do action X is not only legal, but constitutionally protected free speech. (So if a guy walks down a busy street, crudely asking every woman he meets for a quickie, that's not disorderly conduct--that's a protected First Amendment freedom! Unless both of them are at work--then it's sexual harassment, not freedom of speech.)

3. Because the law prohibiting soliciting sex applies no matter whether you are going to do it in the restroom or go somewhere else for sex, the law thus violates a Constitutionally protected right. (A law that prohibited solicitation of sex in a public place might well qualify as Constitutional--although I am sure that the ACLU would challenge that on different grounds.)

On a parallel line, the ACLU argues that there is a right to privacy in a men's room stall based on a 1970 Minnesota Supreme Cour decision that held that two men having sex in a department store restroom stall had a right to privacy. And they argue that the proof is that is the police charged Craig with violating the right to privacy of the police officer in the next stall.

So here's a question: what makes it constitutional to limit sex in public places? And what makes a public restroom stall "private" while the locker room isn't? Almost any argument that starts out with, "You don't have to watch what happens in a stall" suffers the same problem if you change it to, "You don't have to watch what happens in the locker room (or in the middle of a public street)." The rules against sex in public places (or defecating in the middle of a public street) are purely esthetic choices reflecting traditional moral values. Why doesn't the ACLU sue to overturn these laws? Or is that just ten years down the road when they have successfully abolished the laws against having sex in locker rooms?

If you want your children to get used to seeing people having sex in the middle of public streets, make sure you vote Democrat for President this year. You can guarantee that lawyers who think the ACLU is "defending the Constitution" will end up on the federal bench.