Bill of Rights For Real Life: Personal Liberty

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0:22 it may come as a surprise to many Americans today but the people who wrote the US Constitution spent a lot of time and energy arguing about what the Bill of Rights would say and mean to future generations at first there was a good deal of opposition to what would eventually become the Bill of Rights some people believe that any list of Rights would be incomplete and if

0:42 something were left out the government would have more power than was originally intended to sue these concerns James Madison proposed the 9th amendment the 9th amendment is so important because it makes absolutely clear that our rights are not limited to those that are expressly set out in the

1:05 Constitution or in the Bill of Rights in fact the framers were very strongly protective of individual liberty and fall one of the highest purposes of government being to to quote the preamble to the Constitution to secure the blessings of liberty not to provide them and I think the framers were

1:25 inviting future generations of Americans to apply their own experiences in saying that there may be certain rights like rights of privacy that we now think of as vital that they didn’t put down explicitly on the list of rights in the Bill of Rights so what rights are protected by the ninth amendment it

1:46 wasn’t until 1965 that the US Supreme Court mentioned it as one of the reasons for holding a law unconstitutional the decision in Griswold versus Connecticut which upheld the right to privacy and the idea that a married couple could decide for themselves whether or not to use contraceptives is very much tied to

2:07 the language of the ninth amendment because it is a great example of the Supreme Court saying even though words like procreation and reproduction don’t appear in the Bill of Rights nevertheless there are rights not included the 9th amendment tells us that are still protected although there has been an increasing number of ninth

2:28 amendment claims since Griswold courts have been reluctant to Bay their decisions on the 9th amendment alone relying instead on the fifth or 14th amendments the reason is that both the fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments carry something known as due process guarantees guarantees designed to protect an individual’s life liberty and property from arbitrary actions of the

2:50 government some examples of rights that have been protected under due process include the right to marry someone of any race or the right to pursue any career because these due process rights are not enumerated in the Constitution defining due process and what rights should be protected are among the most hotly debated questions of American law

3:12 and life in 1973 in Roe vs. Wade the US Supreme Court found that state abortion laws interfered with a woman’s ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights what the

3:34 Supreme Court really was saying that in the Constitution is imbued a right of personal privacy a right of bodily integrity a right of autonomy that is that is protected from unwarranted government intrusion the Supreme Court

3:55 was wrong in not protecting the life of unborn children the Fifth Amendment protects persons from the deprivation of life without due process even if the court would not acknowledge the unborn child as a person the Tenth Amendment would allow for the state to pass laws

4:18 that protect unborn children the Supreme Court in the case of Roe against Wade arrogated to itself something that had always been meant left to the states that is matters pertained to family marriage divorce children those kinds of things all the way back to the founding of the Constitution those had always been left to the states and they made up

4:40 a right that wasn’t really in the Constitution they talked about emanations from her Ranbir’s of the various sections which was gibberish really which revealed they had no real basis in the Constitution to find the so-called right to an abortion once they had established by what I believe was extra constitutional means a

5:01 right that wasn’t there they’ve had trouble ever since a cultural firestorm ignited as a result of the court’s ruling in Roe vs. Wade and in 1988 the state of Pennsylvania passed a new abortion law the new statute required a number of steps be taken before an

5:21 abortion could be performed abortion rights advocates argued the law violated roe versus wade right-to-life supporters strongly disagree I don’t see it as a as a matter of overturning Roe versus Wade I think Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided and I think that eventually it probably will be overturned Casey was a

5:41 law from Pennsylvania that severely restricted a woman’s right to choose that imposed numerous burdens including spousal consent a woman who needed to get her husband’s consent parental notice biased counseling you know

6:01 numerous obstacles all in our view designed to burden a woman’s decision about whether or not to have an abortion to make the decision much more difficult to act on when women are given more choices and alternatives on the abortion decision they will make a they will feel

6:22 a lot better about their decision they will have 24 hours of a reflection period instead of feeling burdened and that’s what the Casey law did the constitutionality of the Pennsylvania law and the correctness of Roe versus Wade divided both the country and the high court by a slim five to four majority the justices reaffirmed Roe but

6:43 still upheld most of Pennsylvania’s restrictions finding they did not impose any undue burden on a woman’s right to choose good morning a person most responsible for the current moral and legal tug-of-war over doctor assisted suicide in America is Jack Kevorkian their SIM card will stop the heart

7:13 now this is great line straightline the cardiogram will be turned off the cardstock an outspoken advocate of assisted suicide Kevorkian has been repeatedly prosecuted for helping terminally ill people and their lives in any society that consistent

7:33 considers itself enlightened get those words you know what those words mean this could never be a crime no matter what words are written on paper nearly all states have laws that prohibit a doctor from helping someone commit suicide finally a doctor in Washington challenged one such law in court claiming a person should be at liberty

7:54 to choose how to die but in 1997 all nine justices on the Supreme Court agreed the right to commit suicide with assistance is not a fundamental Liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Constitution you have to really contrast these two cases ever since Roe against Wade the abortion issue has been

8:14 a mess yet marches every year and have large controversy on each side because it’s no longer within the people themselves to change the law based upon the moral feelings contrast this with the correct decision that was made in the assisted suicide case where once the decisions made the states now are handling it as they see fit Oregon’s

8:35 handling it one way Washington is handling it in another which is the way the founders always intended in 1982 police went to the home of Michael Hardwick to serve him with a warrant for drinking in public they found Hardwick engaged in sex with another man and arrested him for violating georgia’s sodomy law the

8:55 charges were eventually dropped but then Hardwick sued citing the 9th and 14th amendments Hardwick challenged the constitutionality of the Georgia law there’s a fundamental right to privacy in terms of your own autonomy and there’s a second thread that’s a right to privacy in your home there are two parallel constitutional principles at issue in this case that is to me a

9:17 ridiculous argument you can’t determine the constitutionality of measures by solely solely upon whether it occurs in the home and again that I actually what about dope you want to legalize cocaine in the home you want to legalize incest in the room the

9:37 Supreme Court agreed with Bowers but just barely in a five-to-four decision the justices found that the Constitution does not confer a fundamental right to homosexual activity I think this is a blatant example of judicial bigotry this had nothing to do with freedom of speech freedom of religion all the other kinds of freedoms that were specifically set forth in the Constitution and as a

9:59 result on two grounds the court properly upheld the state statute one was there was nothing in the Constitution that created a right and secondly there was nothing in the Constitution that gave the federal courts the power to overrule the state legislatures in deciding what was a basic moral issue two decades later the court reversed its position on

10:20 homosexual activity in Lawrence vs Texas supporters hailed the decision as a victory for gay rights opponents argued the court had overstepped its bounds and opened the door to gay marriage in the Lawrence against Texas case police officers were summoned to a particular location on in response to a weapons

10:40 disturbance complaint and upon entering a particular home they found the two males engaged in sexual activities they were arrested and convicted of a Texas law which prohibits sodomy by people of the same sex the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence vs Texas will be one of the

11:03 most important cases in gay rights legal history that is because in Lawrence vs Texas the Supreme Court acknowledged for the first time that the relationships that gay people have with each other have something in common with the important personal relationships that

11:25 heterosexual people have with each other the court by reversing literally hundreds of years of jurisprudence and certainly reversing for the first time laws in this country relating to sodomy raised public opinion and people realize what was going on and are concerned about the jeopardy that it puts normal marriage and normal

11:48 family law in because of this rather significant departure at the Supreme Court level besides its sweeping implications the Lawrence decision marked a shift in the courts basis for protecting a particular behavior rather than expanding the notion of privacy developed in the row and Bowers decisions the court held that a Texas

12:08 law prohibiting intimate same-sex contact between consenting adults violated a person’s liberty as protected in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause what people say they have a right to and what are recognized as rights under the law has changed throughout the history of the United States the 9th and 14th amendments were designed to protect

12:29 all the rights that were not listed in the Constitution or elsewhere in the Bill of Rights the question then and now is just who she decide what activities are protected as rights under the 9th amendment I’m Tim O’Brien