Saturday, January 30, 2016

My Privacy Rights Violated when neighbor rents out rooms and doubles our sideroad's population?

Scared of winter, I rented a seasonal studio apartment in the west foothills of Tucson, Arizona.  I've dodged the last 12 winters here.  We have more nose-twitching rabbits than nose-twitching people up here, and a few javelina--wild pigs--knocking down garbage cans and rummaging around for treasure.  More cacti than rabbits, though the rabbits are cuter and a lot harder to step on.  This setup is almost a working definition for heaven on Earth, if you can live with the fact that, to go to anywhere but the bank, bar or pizza, it's a  round trip of 7 to 15 miles.
After I moved in I noticed a neighbor had a sign:  "Rent-seeking in this area violates our privacy rights."
I have a long renting career, and had never been accused of violating some neighbor's privacy right, so I decided to take a tour of privacy rights, bring you along for the ride, and find out if this neighbor was a little cuckoo?  Or maybe he's just cuckhold and trying to take it out on me.  I haven't caught a glimpse of his wife, but I'm looking.  His name, by the way, like mine, is Allan, so maybe she would find me a familiar spirit.  Lots of ways to get even, and I don't recommend any of them.  Every form of revenge--and I mean every one--attacks me the revenge-doer more than it could ever attack the other person.  This is just as true of the desire to get even.  It's an emotional and spiritual dead-end.  If you have an urgent desire for revenge, you might blog about it instead (without lambasting the person who seems to have wronged you), or just get busy doing something else.
My landlord told me he had been renting out his guesthouse, but neighbors complained, so he had to stop because it was against zoning.  He claims zoning allows him to rent up to four rooms to "housemates," so here I am.  Landlord even says he has a letter to prove this, but doesn't think it worth his time to put it under my nose.
We have a hundred new ways to lose our privacy: the Net, high-tech spying methods, data collectors, webcams, all watching us pee behind the bush at the edge of the city park at dusk.  Then there's the US National Security Agency's efforts, some legal and some not, to protect us by snooping through what we do on the Web and the phone.
First guess is that the neighbor, who shares a private drive with us, is talking about private property rights, quite different than privacy rights.  But let's take the long, scenic way around the subject.  You like scenic tours, right?

In 1893 a couple of guys from--where else?--Haaaw-vud wrote an article on The Right to Privacy, which Roscoe Pound, also from Haaaw-vud, said "added a chapter to our law."  I like that chapter; I like privacy. (Would you like to be named Roscoe Pound?  No thanks on the Roscoe, for me.  Pound is easier to say and spell than my "Rasmussen" but I still think it sounds funny.  What if you named your kid Half Pound?) A lifetime later than 1893 (unless you were my grandpa who lived to 102) the US Supreme Court got a case about birth control where it carved out an official new "substantive due process" right to privacy from the US Constitution, which doesn't mention the word.  Ultralibber Connecticut was acting pretty conservative:  it had a law against teaching someone how to prevent pregnancy, and the local head of Planned Parenthood, Ms. Griswold, whose name reminds me of both grease and gristle, had been doing just that.  Tell a family already on the edge of poverty how to avoid that sixth child and they call you a menace to society.   In 2016 this seems like a law to punish enjoying sex or helping other people enjoy it.  Connecticut had apparently decided that having eight kids and ruining mom's health in the process was good for the community.
The Supreme Court disagreed about an American citizen being told by government when and how to procreate.  You know, I like that phrase: the Supreme Court disagreed.  Now if they just didn't disagree with me quite so much!  Mind you, this was 1965, when I was 16, and we had that wicked Warren Court.  It put decisions about having or not having kids in a private realm--what a concept--beyond the reach of government regulation.  The Court drew on several amendments in the Bill of Rights to find this zone or "penumbra" of privacy. 

Wikipedia, treasure house of reliable information, Jan 2016, says Griswold recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment provides a substantive due process right to privacy in planning your family. In 1973 Roe v. Wade drew on this same right to privacy in early- and mid-pregnancy decisions about abortion.  Another famous case, of many, came in 2003 when Lawrence v. Texas found this home-family zone of privacy to shield same-sex couples when they were same-sexing. 
I suspect that if we can elect enough "keep government small and out of our business" children of William F. Buckley, we will return to that bygone era when controlling your own reproduction was criminal.
I was already 16 years old in 1965, and I'm glad I had advice about how to avoid having babies, even if it was unconstitutional. Only an evolving sense of individual liberty, in the form of privacy rights, got the Supreme Court to expand our freedom

We're only started on privacy, but the neighbor's claim looks pretty far-fetched so far.  More on privacy to come next blog, though I'm not promising when, after slumbering here for three years.  This final thought:  Justice Antonin Scalia, a fairly articulate and outspoken guy, believes that evolving ideas of liberty are unconstitutional.  If the framers believed in the death penalty, we all should.  I believe in it, but I don't believe in Scalia's rationale.  He only wants the Constitution to be applied as it was originally intended to be applied in about 1789.  He certainly doesn't believe there's a privacy, or any other, right to abortion.  Let 'em use the condoms or coathangers!  He's a Catholic, so he may not be worried about big families coming from parents who like to do you-know-what and have been told by God not to get their tubes tied. I am not sure how his approach solves, or fails to solve, problems that come up from newfangled things like the Victrola, Tom Edison's talking machine, the IUD, and the digital camera photographing policemen being mean at work. 

 
  

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