-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Right to Privacy: Leave Us Alone (The Nation's Student Essay Contest
Winner)
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Ed Pearl - Dec 13, 2007
The Nation - Oct 22, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071022/thoreson
[For the second annual Nation Student Writing Contest, we asked
students to send us an original, unpublished 800-word essay discussing
what they consider the most im****tant issue for young people in the
2008 presidential campaign. We received more than 600 submissions from
high school and college students in forty-one states. The entries
arrived from big public institutions and tiny liberal arts colleges,
from rural high schools, Indian reservations and large cities. The
students who entered the contest are afraid of being drafted, worried
about their friends serving in Iraq, struggling with debt and gas
prices and anxious about the world they will inherit. We chose one
winning essay--by Ryan Thoreson of Fargo, North Dakota, a recent
graduate of Harvard University, printed below--and five finalists,
whose essays you can read at http://www.thenation.com/student
. Thoreson
receives a cash award of $1,000, and the finalists each receive $250.
All receive Nation subscriptions. This contest was made possible by the
BIL Charitable Trust to recognize and reward the best in student
writing and thinking. -The Editors]
Leave Us Alone
by Ryan Thoreson
In an age when YouTube and blogging make every gaffe on the campaign
trail virtually inescapable, the right to privacy may seem like a
quaintly anachronistic value--especially to the candidates. This
situation may be what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis foresaw in
his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States. Brandeis argued that
increasingly intrusive technology required that the Constitution
protect "the right to be let alone...the right most valued by civilized
men."
While Americans never amended the Constitution to include that right
explicitly, a series of piecemeal decisions culminated in the Warren
Court's ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut, which held that statewide
bans on contraception violated the right to marital privacy. Writing
for a seven-to-two majority, Justice William Douglas affirmed a "zone
of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees,"
found in the "penumbra" of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth
amendments. Griswold paved the way for landmark cases like Roe v. Wade
and Lawrence v. Texas, making it one of the most influential (and
controversial) precedents in recent history.
But as the eightieth anniversary of Olmstead approaches, this patchwork
quilt of precedent is growing threadbare. Lawmakers have seemingly
discarded privacy, chipping away at that right in the name of
collective concerns like productivity, security and public morality.
The conservative members of the Supreme Court are skeptical of its
validity; in their dissents in Lawrence, Justice Antonin Scalia
qualified privacy as a "so-called" right, while Justice Clarence Thomas
maintained that a constitutional right to privacy simply does not exist.
In 2008 the electorate's top priority should be the re-establishment of
a right that has been under siege for decades. Privacy should not only
include the "penumbra" of protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights;
the right to privacy should distinguish private pursuits from public
responsibilities and should safeguard our bodies and behaviors against
the whims of the majority. Candidates should promote and respect a
right to privacy, either by observing that right as a first principle
of policy-making or proposing a constitutional amendment that would
enshrine it in law. While a balance must undoubtedly be struck between
individual rights and collective responsibilities, a right to privacy
would solidly establish a presumption in favor of individual choice,
reversing our deification of the anxieties and values of the majority
that guide our policy-making.
The controversial actions of elected officials have bluntly demonstrated
that Americans can no longer take privacy for granted. Since 9/11 a
climate of fear and hysteria has been coupled with intrusive technology
that puts any de facto right to privacy in an increasingly precarious
position. Leaders on both sides of the aisle have embraced
unprecedented intrusions into the private lives of Americans with laws
like the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, stripping away
basic search-and-seizure protections. In many instances, the specter of
terrorism has been used to justify illegal wiretapping without
warrants, extraordinary renditions and torture. In instances such as
these--when the state asserts a compelling interest in detention and
interrogation--a vigorous defense of the right to be let alone would
affirm principles like habeas corpus, due process and trial by a jury
of one's peers, protections that safeguard the individual first and
foremost.
By explicitly sup****ting a right to privacy, presidential candidates
could also help settle some of the most divisive and protracted
disputes of our time. The ****ft would be particularly im****tant in
cases where intrusive measures are used to monitor those who merely
seem suspicious or commit essentially victimless crimes. The tone and
tenor of debates about racial profiling, workplace privacy, low-level
drug use, ***ual harassment, reproductive rights and consensual ***
between adults would be radically different with the seemingly benign
acknowledgment that Americans deserve their personal privacy. On social
issues where a small segment of the public has exerted enormous
influence, Americans are constantly reminded that faith, patriotism and
markets can rob us of our ability to govern ourselves if we allow those
forces to regulate the private behavior of everyone else. As a right
that resonates with the mainstream as much as it protects the
marginalized, privacy may decisively settle these controversial debates
about self-governance and bodily integrity.
A truly expansive reading of the right to privacy might also be used to
combat unnecessary intrusions of public interest on our private
well-being. For example, candidates could stress that poverty robs us
of privacy when the lives of welfare recipients are closely monitored
and residents of housing projects have their units ransacked
unannounced. And with the expansion of cyberspace and surveillance,
privacy lays the groundwork for progress in areas that we, like Justice
Brandeis, may not yet be able to imagine.
We have never needed our leaders to insist on the right to privacy as
much as we do today, when the privacy of individual citizens has
rapidly eroded without any corresponding increase in public
transparency and accountability. Obviously, no candidate in 2008 will
be able to single-handedly establish a right to privacy--but by
insisting on privacy as a guiding principle for policy-making and an
ideological cornerstone of our government, candidates have the
potential to revive an ideal that's been under renewed attack since
2001. And when they do, they can rest assured that YouTube will capture
the moment for generations of profoundly grateful Americans.
[Ryan Thoreson, co-chair of the Harvrd Bi***ual, Gay, Lesbian,
Transgender and Sup****ters' Alliance from 2005-2006, is a Rhodes
Scholar studying social anthropology at Oxford University. His work
has appeared in The Advocate and The American Prospect.]
*
=================================================================
NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
Our main website: http://www.blythe.org
List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (FreeBSD)
iD8DBQFHYbSviz2i76ou9wQRAikoAJ4yP8SrIYQ5q2FoUXOLiMkaMwTiYgCfV16J
A/+yZ4Pk5Td1N7wQ+jUVFvI=
=DpKw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
