Breaking out the Blue Pencil

Ricardo's book hits shelves on Boxing Day, which is exciting news for everyone involved. In advance of publication, Yale University Press suggested he try to place an op-ed piece in the New York Times, explaining why John Wilkes, a funkadelic member of the British Parliament in the 18th century, is relevant to American readers in the 21st. It's an easy case to make, given that when the Framers wrote civil liberties into the Constitution, they were thinking specficially about Wilkes. He was jailed by the crown for saying snarky things about monarch, had his papers confiscated and his property impounded. Those who are interested in preserving civil liberties don't have to actually invent modern-day threats to individual rights.

Ricardo engaged his whelp of a son-in-law in tailoring his piece to newspaper style. I didn't do much, other than convince him to move Wilkes further up in the piece and try to inject Supreme Court politics into it. To his credit, Ricardo listened to the former suggestion and not the latter. Ricardo felt more comfortable sticking to civil liberties, which is his area of expertise. But since I have a blog, I'll make the argument here.

Wilkes' story, Ricardo writes, was the basis of the Fourth Amendment. But what interested me in our discussion was how he referred to it as the "right to privacy." Whether that right really exists is, with a Supreme Court justice about to face the Senate, up for debate. Ricardo is an 18th century historian, which opened the possibility in my mind that you could make a reasonable argument that privacy was on the collective mind of the Framers. They just expressed it through a law that codified the right to have freedom from having your house entered by government forces and your stuff taken by the just because the government wants to. So even if Roe v. Wade has some flaws, it still reflects something the Framers were thinking about. This was an 18th century understanding of privacy, in a time where the amount of privacy necessary to function in the 21st century couldn't be fathomed.

Of course, if you believe the law is just words on a page, maybe you'll never be convinced. And, as Anna points out, it's murky ground when we start talking about Framers' intent. After all, the syphilitic mofos who acutally wrote the Constitution would have certainly opposed abortion. She's probably right. But I believe in engaging an argument on all sides, even in trying to speak the language of people who will never possibly agree with me.