The FMA may be more important than we realized

Now that Sully has flipped a bit and realized that the Bush administration's alliance with the most intolerant strain of cultural conservatism is no joke, he has some very, very scary speculation for us from a lawyer who emailed him with the implications of the FMA.

Under the Constitution of the United States there is no express right to privacy, rather this right to be free from excessive government interference in our personal lives has arisen from Supreme Court precedent that cites the lack of regulation of intimate relationships and the protections of the bill of rights as the basis for an inference of the right to privacy. The right to privacy, according the Supreme Court is found in the penumbras and emanations of these two factors. A shadow of a right, very delicate and now threatened.

By including a provision regulating the most intimate of relationships into the Constitution, the traditional analysis that the court has used to limit government power will be fundamentally changed and the right to privacy, if it is not destroyed completely, will be severely curtailed. As a result, decisions like Roe v. Wade, (Abortion), Griswold v. Connecticut (Birth Control), Lawrence v. Texas (Private Sexual Acts), will all be fair game for re-analysis ...

If you've read the ongoing attacks on the right to privacy reading of constitutional law in conservative jurists' rhetoric over the last decade, this is terrifyingly credible.

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I have a long follow-up post about how thoroughly terrible Andrew Sullivan is.