Bookworm Room

Tweet In 1973, the United States Supreme Court created a federal right to abortion by finding that abortion falls into an unstated Constitutional dimension called “the right to privacy.”  (Note:  British and American common law has always recognized a right to privacy, but the Constitution makes no mention of it.)  Thus, in Roe v. Wade, [...]

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Tweet Some of you may have been aware of a very ugly situation that started when NewsRealBlog concluded that one of its contributors (not an employee, but a contributor), displayed a truly unhealthy sexual interest in young children.  Although the editors at NewsRealBlog are conservative, they also respect an individual’s right to privacy.  However, if [...]

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Tweet All over my “real me” facebook, my liberal friends have been treating Tyler Clementi’s tragic suicide by framing him as a victim of an anti-gay crime.  I saw it as him being the victim of the total loss of sexual privacy.  I was going to blog about that, but IBD got there first and [...]

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Tweet Country of origin strikes me as a reasonable question for a census, although it’s not constitutionally mandated.  (The Constitution just allows for a head count.)  Race questions are obviously simply to satisfy the grievance mongers in America.  So I pass on this advice from The Corner: Sending a Message with the Census [Mark Krikorian] [...]

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Tweet I would have thought the earth would reverse its rotation before I’d find common ground with Andrew Sullivan.  Apparently nothing so extreme had to happen.  All Sullivan had to do was advocate precisely the same point I’ve been making forever which is that Obama needs to stop being so secretive.  Here’s Sullivan: So many [...]

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Tweet For reasons too complicated to explain, I have more than a passing knowledge about medical informatics — or, in simple terms, the trend to put all patient records in computerized systems.  That’s why, at a soccer game, a young woman who is clearly an Obama supporter asked me what I thought of the move [...]

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Tweet More than twenty years ago, I attended a speech that famed legal scholar Arthur Miller gave, in which he decried the fact that the zone of privacy surrounding ordinary citizens was shrinking rapidly with the dawn of the computer age. What he pointed out then is even more true today: unless you step entirely [...]

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