AP Article on the Pryor Nomination

The AP article linked from the previous post says:

[Pryor] also came under fire for filing a Supreme Court brief in a Texas sodomy case comparing homosexual acts to "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia."

Someone reading that in the paper might reasonably conclude that Pryor was making a moral comparison between the various activities mentioned. However, as many others have pointed out, that is simply not the case. His comparison was for the sole purpose of evaluating whether state limitations on individual conduct are constitutional. It is essential to look at Pryor's words in their full context, rather through the distorted lens of the mainstream media. The "controversial" part of that amicus curiae brief he filed in Lawrence v. Texas is quoted below. Decide for yourself.

It should be noted, again, that the Texas statute in question does not criminalize petitioners’ sexual orientation, which may or may not be a matter of choice and thus may arguably be protected from state discrimination by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Rather, the Texas antisodomy statute criminalizes petitioners’ sexual activity, which is indisputably a matter of choice. Petitioners’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, a constitutional right that protects “the choice of one’s partner” and “whether and how to connect sexually” must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia (if the child should credibly claim to be “willing”). For all intents and purposes, petitioners seek to enshrine as the defining tenet of modern constitutional jurisprudence the sophomoric libertarian mantra from the musical “Hair”: “be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just as long as you don’t hurt anybody.” Bracketing for the moment the dubious proposition that any human behavior is purely self affecting, suffice it to say that so expansive and undisciplined an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would constitute a radical departure from the historical analysis that this Court has always employed in its fundamental rights jurisprudence. It would embrace the very principle rejected by this Court in Roe v. Wade, that “one has an unlimited right to do with one’s body as one pleases. And it would ignore this Court’s admonition in Glucksberg that the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect “any and all important, intimate, and personal decisions.”