I know I said I wouldn't post today, and this is the only one, but:

(1) He's right, but I already grilled up a steak for that;

(2) He's right, too, that I shouldn't rejoice in others' toasty time in Asmodeus's House of Barbed Sodomy and Dismemberment, and I'd like to say I don't, and that I was only explicitly talking about death, not about the consequence thereof, but I don't want to compund my sin with lying on top of it;

(2a) I should note that the linked information in that post is correct insofar as a Lexis-Nexis search shows. Ms. Child, for example, only does live cooking at Smith College and Planned Murder events. However, I could be mistaken; if I am, I invite corrections.

and

(3) 62.13018% - Extreme Geek. I know what THAC0 is. And I can calculate it -- in my head, with an AC of -14, a fighter of 15th level wearing a girdle of Storm Giant Strength, and a long sword +1, +6 against the creature with the AC -14. Nuff said.

Happy Fourth, all.

Proof #489,254,121 that I'm going to Hell:

Aw.

I will not be posting tomorrow; therefore, Happy Fourth of July, folks.

God Bless America.

Dammit: Dammit, dammit, dammit, DAMMIT: That SOB Rick Reilly wrote something worth reading.

Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?

Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?

Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."

So why? Why did the 24-year-old Kansas City Chief try to save three boys he didn't know with a skill he didn't have?

He'd been sitting in the cool shade of a tree on a tar-bubbling afternoon at Chennault Park, a public recreation area in Monroe, La., when he heard voices calling, "Help! Help!" He popped up like a Bobo doll and sprinted toward the pit.

Every day from this day forward, I pray to God that I can be such a man. Most of us like to think we'd be like Delaney, or the men who raced into those burning towers without a second thought; if we're honest, few of us are.

RIP, Mr. Delaney.

Via Orrin Judd.

And, on a related note, Ramesh Ponnuru rocks:

If you share Scalia's view of such decisions as Casey, Romer, Dickerson, Stenberg, Lawrence, et al, then it is altogether rational to deploy a rhetoric that exposes the essential fraudulence of the Court's claim to be interpreting the Constitution. (One assumes that the justices themselves are part of the audience to which he means to expose it.) What Justice Scalia is trying to do, in other words, is to demystify the Court; to suggest that it is engaged in exercises of raw judicial power. (Part of that power consists of our ignorance of the fact.)

Justice Scalia is not alone in seeing things this way. From time to time, the liberal justices accuse conservative majorities of raw politics as well, with heated rhetoric. (Pick a federalism case and read the dissents.) And Scalia's aspersions against the legitimacy of the Court's "constitutional law" reflect a half-century of conservative rhetoric on the judiciary. That rhetoric still underlies the Republican party's position. Every Republican senator who says he wants a judge who will "apply" rather than "make" the law is implicitly accusing some judges of exceeding their legitimate powers.

To reject the Broder-Sullivan critique of Justice Scalia, in short, is to begin to see something important about modern judicial politics — something to which the good justice is trying to awaken us.

Someday, if I eat all my veggies and pray very hard, I might be that good a writer. Probably not, but I can dream, can't I?

Y'know, Andrew Sullivan was off and racing the other day on Constitutional law, a subject about which he knows little, and Bill Pryor and Nino Scalia, subjects about which he apparently knows less. I thought about saying something; then Feddie said it better here and here and, indeed, in other spots too.

Helluva blog, that one.

Blogging promises to be light the next week or two; those who know why, will know why, and the rest of humanity will do what it usually does and disregard this blog.

Anyway, before I sorta go, a brief note to my wife on why it would be bad for me to seek electoral office, especially as I am now:

Katherine Hepburn is dead, and I owe myself a pizza.

You see, it is my habit to order a pizza in celebration whenever an ardent fan of slaughtering infants in utero kicks the bucket. Thurgood Marshall did some serious good in his time, but his me-tooism to Brennan with Roe and the descendent decisions, to my mind, voided all the good he did (hint: you advocate murderering one group of people, it overwhelms helping free another). So -- especially after all of his unseemly Reagan-bashing, I felt Domino's was in order.

And when Blackmun died, let's just say I was stuffed for a day, and the local Pizza Hut delivery guy was significantly richer. Teddy Kennedy's death in a drunken orgy in a van at the bottom of a cold New England river will bring the same result.

So, in tribute to an old bitch who felt life was just too good a thing to share with millions of babies, I'm thinking Godfather's some time this week.

Oh, and one thing: Don't hand me that "she just supported Planned Parenthood for the birth control" crap. Putting every other argument to the side, if that's what she really wanted, she could've lobbied for Merck.

Talk about this.

Ben Domenech marvels that John McCain didn't mention Bush in his paean to John Kerry. I marvel that he didn't mention himself more.

Damn, but this is funny.

Oh, and because the whole sodomy case-thing reminded me about this:

Salus populi suprema lex, contrary to Glenn Reynolds and Dave Kopel is:

(1) Never rendered as salus populi est suprema lex, because, for those of us who made it past the first six weeks of Latin I in high school, it is apparent that in a declarative statement such as this, the third person form of esse finishes the sentence, and, more importantly, the Latin saying does not include a verb, sort of like Senatus populusque Romanum (which is nonetheless a perfectly acceptable statement). It's called "idiom."

(2) Not simply concerned with the people's bodily or spiritual or psychic health. It's an overall measure; it's frequently cited in commentaries as a justification for the State's right to go to war. Try reading an elementary primer on Roman Law. (The best translation is The welfare of the people is the highest Law. Reading salus as health as in heart disease is a very elementary error.)

(3) A vital component of Roman, then Canon-derived, then Medieval European, then Common- and Civil-law rules of law. To pretend that the states of our system never legislated on public health until the late nineteenth century -- as Kopel and Reynolds do -- is sophistic, at best.

(4) A very good encapsulation of what a government is for. Libertoids have forgotten this, but the reason we give up any of our liberties to our government is three-fold: (a) We need collective security. (b) We have a hell of a collective action problem, especially in times of stress. (c) Governments of necessity seek to preserve the physical integrities of their subjects, in war and in social interaction.

I stopped reading, and started crying, when I read this.

I want to be rich.

The next time the Loony Libs carry on about the GOP's "Southern Strategy," just remember these choice bits from this article, and ask yourself, "Huh?"

It was in the 1968 campaign that the "southern strategy" was born. Its message relied on code words and phrases. For example, "freedom of choice," a term used by Thurmond, meant opposition to school desegregation. Similarly, Nixon pledged that he would not make the South a "whipping boy," meaning that his administration would enforce the law, but also would be sympathetic to southern concerns.

Those terms, and the things for which they stood, are gone. Forever. Whether or not the GOP got the South this way, it holds it by conforming to economically and socially conservative policies. Marshall and the kids are nuts if they think anyone in any numbers even knows what this garbage means any more.

Oh: RIP, Strom. May buxom, Daisy-Fuentes look-alike angels carry you to your rest. Without getting groped.

Ok, so the rage is a little cooled. Here's the roundup on reaction to the latest example of the Supreme Court deciding that it should be the decision maker in the nation:

Clayton Cramer correctly points out that the Court was dishonest, at best, about the bases for its ruling.

The usual band of Libertoid suspects is happy that a bulwark against incest is now gone. (That's as much equal time as they get.)

Feddie over at Southern Appeal has a fantastic roundup (with links). I won't spoil the best part, but you can jump to it here.

Orrin Judd is succinct:

You can defend or oppose anti-sodomy laws on the merits, but there's something no one can do who cares about constitutional government: concede the notion that the Court can strike down ancient laws on the basis that they violate some newfound liberty. If such laws are to be stricken it should be done only by legislatures or via the constitutional amendment process.

Stuart Buck surprisingly hasn't weighed in -- surprisingly because he's a very bright appellate lawyer, and this is right up his alley. UPDATED: Buck's in the house.

Updates to come, including a full explanation of why this upsets me so much.

UPDATES STARTING NOW: Ben Domenech has a full-length attack here. My only beef with Ben on this is that he seems surprised that this "casts the court in a position of playing political games instead of actually fairly interpreting the law." Poor guy.

Paul Cella is in high dudgeon; I'd quote him, but I wouldn't be doing him justice. Do stop over and read him; but please wait until after you've read what I've written, lest my own writing seem the worse for it.

Now for why this upsets me:

(Please read the majority opinion, Sandy O'Connor's opinion, Nino's dissent, and Thomas's dissent before proceeding.)

The Court, very deliberately, smashed society at its base.

Let me elaborate, for fear that my two to three readers will think I'm either exaggerating or carrying some sort of animus toward folks who like synchronized swimming, so to speak.

A society is a collection of individuals bound by consent and a shared set of moral norms, frequently formalized as laws. Thus, one may have a society that institutionalizes certain kinds of killing (the Danes, Jutes, and so on from Beowulf's time, with their respect for honor killings; our society, with the death penalty; samurai culture, with seppuku; and so on), family arrangements ("traditional marriage," patriarchal polygamy, and so on), wealth distribution (our system offers a very organized liberty in this regard; more communal societies do not), and so on. At base, these represent common moral judgments. It is bad to kill; it is bad to kill, unless the man whom you are killing insulted your clan; it is good to have one man and one woman as the base of a family arrangement; and so on. Each law, each regulation, is nothing more than the result of a balancing act of various moral principles. This is the essential truth that the Libertarians -- who are, essentially, individualists with a delusional view of human nature -- have sadly forgotten: In order to make a society function, one must be willing to forego certain liberties to the majority's mores. Thus, I may not slaughter every doctor who slices up children in utero for fun and profit, because society has made two very important moral judgments: (1) It is bad to kill someone who neither threatens you, nor those close to you; and (2) it is bad to take the law -- especially a law not recognized by the majority of society -- into your own hands, because this causes chaos and harm out of proportion to the justice you may or may not do. (Indeed, another moral judgment is at the base of this: It is better to let women kill their children in the womb, than to force them to take the consequences of their own actions bring the child to term.)

To strip a society of its ability to legislate common morality is to prune, and eventually destroy, that society's ability to survive. The whole of our law is predicated on moral judgments and ideals. We take our law from Germanic moral judgments, Roman Law, and the Code of Canon Law. Each of these is at base a series of moral judgments. Our old common law -- the law from England, the law before parliaments and legislatures sat with some self-importance and some legitimacy and began to record our law -- was always a moral act. It is not licit that a man should go onto another man's property and take the fruit of that property for his own. Whoso takes another man's wyfe for his own shall suffer a penalty at law. You get the idea.

Our states are the most democratic -- i.e., the most responsive -- governments we have. They respond best to majority moral suasion, quite simply because they are both closest to, and most concerned about, social cohesion. When you strip a consensual government's ability to regulate on this principle -- which, being consensual, is a rare regulation -- you strip its ability to moderate and aid interaction among its members. Much as the Libertoids may wish otherwise, society is both a collection of individuals and an organic thing in itself. It is in balancing that dichotomy that an acceptable government exists.

There is nothing at all conservative about celebrating social revolution by judicial fiat. Or, as Orrin Judd puts it: "[T]he Republic is always weakened when intellectual elites find it necessary to impose via judicial fiat that which they are incapable of securing through the political process."

On a related note, to all who see this as something loosely akin to desegregation: Kindly shoot yourselves. You either have lost any sense of proportion, or are in the habit of talking about things about which you know very little. Slavery and Jim Crow were murderous, oppressive systems that didn't merely seek to control sexual interaction; they dehumanized, slaughtered, degraded, and, you know, segregated a large class of people into what we could charitably call ghettoes. Or, as a much brighter man than I put it, "When I watch Ken Burns, I don't see too many people picking cotton because of their private, consensual sexual activity."

The Court aggrandized more power to itself, and did so with the sort of language one always uses when one is covering a great lie: "liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions," etc. A court confident that it was indeed extolling a mandate "rooted firmly in the Constitution," so to speak, would not employ such language.

Social cohesion, and therefore societies, die by such incremental steps.

As Justice Scalia asks, where, O where, is our iron-bound determination to hold to stare decisis now?

The word, folks, is "hypocrites." Actually, the correct phrase is "results-driven ideologues." Slaughtering babies in utero is ok, because we once said it was; prohibiting consensual sodomy is not, even though we (more recently) said it was.

The law was silly, and possibly morally wrong (possibly not -- there's an interesting balancing at work in such things); but it was, and has been, constitutional -- until, that is, six of our philosopher kings decided they didn't like it any more.

Like Paul Cella, I begin to feel an alien in my own land.

Now, on to controversy:

He's right. I'm thinking about getting some of those Third World Bishops, Anglican, Catholic, whatever, to start evangelizing here.

And the Three Laws are about to be on my title bar.

And I like the "View Blog" feature. A lot.

Blogger is apparently back. On the upside, the interface in Mozilla is much, much better.

You don't stop in for a couple of days, and you miss laughs like this one.

On an unrelated note, congratulations to this guy, for all of my many disagreements with him.