Round Three or Maybe Four on the Right to Privacy

First I'll say that to make my blog more interesting, even to me, I found one--no--several ways to include sex a certain number of lines down this.  Nothing too drastic, but slightly spicy.
As a paralegal whose main talent is unpaid legal research and writing, I decided to delve further into the law of privacy by making a trip to the University of Arizona law library near downtown Tucson.  To get there I had to drive on streets clogged with huge numbers of other "winter visitors" like me.  Once I attained the quiet of the library, I was the only person there without a laptop.  Despite that disadvantage, I found Corpus Juris, one of two well-known US legal encyclopedias, and made a long set of notes.  The following comes rather slavishly from Corpus Juris.  I forgot to note the year, which is bad form in legal citation.  Volume 16B, approximately sections 1001 - 1040.  It gives us (or at least me) a more general set of ideas about this right.

The privacy right is a fundamental personal right--can't you imagine a tall dark-haired legally trained speaker sounding very serious?  Go ahead; try to imagine that; I am.  Isn't Ted Cruz a lawyer?  He'll do.  Donald Trump is not dignified enough for this part.  Cruz intones "fundamental personal right."    It is to be accorded the same deference as the right of free speech.  Don't you love it when a court "accords" something, especially deference?  It has been called the "most comprehensive right." Sounds important.  Now if we just knew what it meant.  More comprehensive than the right to a jury trial?  I guess.  Applies to the most varied situations?  Who can tell?  Wait, though--it is limited--hear the audience gasp.  It's comprehensive yet limited!  Oh, the law.  We're lost already.  But we must try to go on.  With Ted Cruz' help, we shall.

These are our Rights we're figuring out here--the things that may keep us out of jail if we--pardon the indelicate term--"jack off" and President Cruz passes a law against it.  He never does that himself.  He has a wife.  Who ever heard of anyone with a wife amusing himself in private?  Look, I have a book-length draft about those kinds of subjects you may be able to read on request, but not here.  My son Eric, a perceptive type not at all interested in reading about either his father's sex or legal opinions, noted at age 15 that a law against teenage boys "amusing themselves in private" would be hard to enforce.  Back to that old, or rather, young privacy right, which is limited to rights that are fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty.  The concept of ordered liberty, I can tell you from a lot of unnecessarily legal reading, is, as Bill Murray put it in Ghostbusters, "very big in Gozer," or at least very big in US courts. We could even do a blog some day on ordered liberty.  (One on Gozer might draw more readers.  I've actually been working a little on a place related to Gozer, which is where a demon comes from.  It's called Ashtar, claims to be quite a bit closer to Earth then Gozer ever was, and has mostly only white witches.) Nobody else would learn anything from that sort of blog--you don't think anybody besides Alan Rasmussen reads this stuff, do you?  There's no "you" in "you" here.  Kind of like certain small towns in southern Utah--no there there.  Well, the blow, I mean the blog.  Beware of alluding to sex in essays; Freudian slips occur.  The blog does have about 175 page-views that don't seem to be me.  Who knows?  Maybe "we" will educate the masses!  If so we will hurry to tell them that privacy includes mental privacy, which should be a relief to everybody.  I seem to have the right to think about any damned thing I want to.  With or without the help of the Supreme Court.   This blog should serve as some demonstration of that.  Do I need mental privacy protected by law when I already possess absolute privacy to my thoughts, at least on this side of the veil?   
Constitutional Privacy has two strands.
First it avers one's independence, and
second, it avoids or blocks disclosure. It shields activities so private or personal as to be of no concern to others, and yet I think masturbation is illegal in 11 states, and oral sex in 26, but I didn't verify it on Wikipedia.  So there are some others concerned whether the Constitution thinks they should be or not.
Those concerned people will be relieved to hear that the right protects only a reasonable expectation of privacy. Out in public few if any privacy rights hold sway.  I used to have a knock-em-dead-lovely girlfriend Andy Gentry.  Died of breast cancer; wasn't quite that lovely after a while with cancer.  Anyway, back in the lovely days, Andy thought it would be exciting to make love between the bushes at the edge of a public park, or in the car a little out of the way but not too far.  The thought of getting caught, hopefully not by people wearing blue uniforms, was spicy to her, but she wasn't protected by privacy law.  You wonder if we were foolish enough to test her fantasy?  I won't say, except to note we were fairly foolish, as lovers can be.  And to say we were never summoned before a court of law for anything we did together although she was still divorcing when . . .  I'm off the subject, but it's more interesting than the subject, isn't it?  Maybe I'm doing the wrong blog.   

Home and family are two "zones of privacy" for lawful acts. Intrusion into these zones must be for legitimate government interests. The privacy right does not confer the right to impose one's lifestyle on another whose privacy will be thus invaded. Try to tell them that in Utah, where imposing numerous elements of Mormon lifestyle on every soul is considered one of the sacred functions of both state and local government. If you hold contraband, your privacy right doesn't protect you from having this found out. Smoking pot is not a fundamental right of American justice, per courts in Washington and Massachusetts. There is no private right to watch obscenity in public, though you can at home, but beware of kiddie porn.  I'll tell you to destroy the stuff if I catch you.  Kiddies and porn don't mix.  About that I'm serious.