Let's note that there is nothing automatic about having "human rights." You don't believe me? You know that all people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? That line was written not by our blog's Esteemed John Adams, but by his friend T Jefferson. Adams and Ben Franklin told "Thomas," as John called him, to try his hand at writing a declaration of independence. Jefferson was an articulate Virginian who had the tendency to indulge himself far more than Mr Adams ever did (spending money he didn't have, charming women he didn't marry, ignoring Supreme Court rulings he didn't like). I don't think Adams did any of those things, but at least the first two were habits Jefferson cultivated. Back to those rights, I agree we are thus endowed by our Creator, but a visit to either Russia or Syria in 2016 will show that our Creator isn't driving around enforcing those inalienable rights. Providence seems to leave that to us, while, I allege, giving quite a bit of invisible help to those of us who work on such worthy causes. Makes a nice-sounding theory, anyway.
We humans have been claiming to have certain basic rights for a very long time, but the idea has mostly picked up steam in the last 300 or so years, and even more so in the last 100 years. A little more than 100 years ago someone in the US first wrote a piece claiming that Americans possessed a constitutional right to privacy, even though the Constitution doesn't use the word "privacy." Then along came Thurgood Marshall.
The grandson of a slave, Marshall was a black kid born in 1908 in Baltimore. He went to Howard Law School, then an all-black school because the University of Maryland law school was for whites only in the 1920s. Marshall became possibly the 20th century's most important US lawyer, fighting for broader civil rights and criminal rights, mostly for the NAACP's Inc. Fund. In 1967 he ascended to the Supreme Court. Two years later he wrote the opinion in Stanley v. Georgia, a privacy case. The "polices" had a search warrant to search Stanley's home for evidence of another crime, bookmaking, but they found no evidence of it. What they did see were three reels of what were probably truly tasteless pornography. The stuff was ruled obscene in violation of Georgia's obscenity law. The state supreme court upheld the conviction, but Mr. Stanley questioned their right to tell him what to read or watch while he sat home alone. The US Supreme Court reversed his conviction by unanimous vote. Thurgood
Marshall wrote that obscenity, at least at home, was largely a
personal privacy question. "If the First Amendment means
anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man,
sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films
he may watch." Hence was
created or found a
constitutional right to possess obscene material at home, as long as it's not kiddie porn.
Be careful how you carry even the adult stuff around in your car, though.
“We
hold that the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit making mere
private possession of obscene material a crime."
The
defendant was
“asserting the right to be free from state inquiry into the
contents of his library.
. . The
line between the transmission of ideas and mere entertainment is much
too elusive for this Court
to draw, if indeed such a line can be drawn at all.”
This
is the kind of case that makes me proud to be an American. To prove it, I'm gonna hurry out and get some "spicy" films, maybe with Kim Basinger or Bo Derek displaying their pleasant qualities, to rest from all this heavy legal reasoning and historical study.
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