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11:59 PM - ACLU banquet This evening I enjoyed a rare opportunity to hang out with a group of people who call themselves "civil libertarians" and whom my mother-in-law refers to as "commie pinkos." I'm afraid that they are both right, but each only to an extent. The Angie Debo award winner for this year called for recognition of a constitutional right to "freedom from want" in his acceptance speech, a proposition warmly greeted by the crowd, with few exceptions. Those of us who consider forced (as opposed to voluntary charitable) programs of wealth redistribution to be foundational to any totalitarian state have some great difficulty seeing how such programs could ever be made to coexist with robust protection of the geniune civil liberties called for in the bill of rights. The keynote speaker was quite an eccentric fellow who has mounted a remarkably quixotic attack on the 1954 federal law declaring our nation to be "under God" in a spasm of red-scared patriotic fervor. The gist of his message was fairly simple, that the Founders quite deliberately chose to leave matters of godliness, piety, and civic deism out of the Constitution and all federal oaths of offices, and that we should honor their "original intent" for our nation at least in this particular matter. Accordingly, his speech provided a fascinating preview into the arguments that he may well make before a new and vastly more conservative Supreme Court should he ever be afforded the opportunity. Fascinating, I say, because he is deliberately pitching an original intent argument to an originalist court. Update: Technorati tags: (
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