Both parties disingeneous about Privacy Rights

Interesting commentary by Tibor Machon in the Desert Dispatch discussing what the constitution says about privacy and how each party interprets those areas.

But perhaps the most controversial matter that will again surface during the hearings is whether the Constitution contains the right to privacy, a right supposedly implicit in it, as modern liberals and some others read that document -- for example, via the Ninth Amendment (which refers to unenumerated rights, thus intimating quite unambiguously that besides rights listed explicitly in the Bill of Rights, human beings have others, as well). It was on the basis of finding such a right that the famous decision was made that struck down the law banning the sale of contraceptives in Connecticut back in 1965.

What is interesting about the concern with this right to privacy is how it has become the mantra of the American left. And it is the American right, led on the court by Justice Antonin Scalia, that has strong objections to it. Does this not strike anyone as paradoxical?

American conservatives have been identified as individualists, especially when it comes to their economic views. They used to champion capitalism and the right to private property. This right they identified in the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment. When recently the court ran roughshod over this right in its New London (Conn.) v. Kelo ruling, the American right still voiced some protest. Indeed, its greatest hero on the court, Justice Clarence Thomas, was in the outspoken minority wishing to uphold that right.