On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 22:04 -0400, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> >
> I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. Everyone has a right (at least in
> the US) to the "pursuit of happiness."
Not really. The phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence, not
the Constitution. There's no explicit right to "the pursuit of
happiness" in the Bill of Rights.
Interestingly, though, the phrase was used by Justice Earl Warren in
Loving v. Virginia, which overturned anti-miscegenation laws. Warren
wrote "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital
personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free
men."
Given the current status of gay marriage in the U.S., we plainly do not
have an unambiguous right to the pursuit of happiness -- not when the
President, playing to the typically bigoted and intolerant Christian
base of the Republican Party, has proposed a Constitutional amendment
restricting marriage to opposite-sex partners, in the same way that the
majority of states once restricted marriage to members of the same race,
also because of Christian prejudices. ("Almighty God created the races
white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate
continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there
would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the
races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." -- from the
ruling upholding Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, which the Supreme
Court overturned.)
--
Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream." --S. Jackson
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