Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century - Steve Chapman

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unleashed Operation Desert Storm on himself.

      No one has been appeasing him since then, either. On the contrary, we’ve kept the Iraqi regime confined to a tight little cage.

      The two no-fly zones enforced by British and American fighters cover most of Iraq. Meanwhile, economic sanctions have kept him from buying weapons and spare parts, or doing much of anything to rebuild his army. “Hitler got more powerful with time, while Saddam has gotten weaker,” notes John Mearsheimer, a defense scholar at the University of Chicago.

      We’ve stationed thousands of troops in Kuwait, we have air bases in Saudi Arabia, and we generally keep an aircraft carrier within striking distance of Iraq at all times. In short, we’ve let Hussein know that if he ever sets one toe across any of his borders, we’ll stomp him flatter than a straw hat on the interstate.

      “Everyone agrees we have to take action against him,” says Mearsheimer, who says the choice is not between war and appeasement, but “containment versus rollback.” The policy of containment, backed by our nuclear deterrent, is the same policy the United States employed against the Soviet Union for 40 years, with successful results.

      Hawks claim to be rejecting the policies of Neville Chamberlain that brought on World War II. What they’re really rejecting is the policy of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan — which won the Cold War and can win this one.

       Laws against sodomy have become outmoded

       Thursday, December 5, 2002

      One night four years ago, sheriff’s officers acting on a complaint of an armed man creating a disturbance in a Pasadena, Texas, apartment, entered the dwelling and barged into a bedroom. But all they found was a couple enjoying a pastime commonly enjoyed by couples in their bedrooms, and I don’t mean organizing the closet.

      You might guess that at this point, the cops would have blushed, apologized and left as fast as their feet would carry them. Wrong. They arrested the couple under the Texas anti-sodomy statute.

      You see, John Lawrence and Tyron Garner are both males, and the state prohibits acts of sodomy between people of the same sex. Lawrence and Garner were arrested, convicted and fined $200 apiece.

      There are some laws that exist only because no one would ever dream of enforcing them. Anti-sodomy statutes, which forbid carnal deeds that have been committed by the overwhelming majority of American adults, are a prime example. Until 1961, every state prohibited sodomy. But most people have lost interest in regulating what others do between the sheets. Today, sodomy laws exist in only 13 states.

      Most of those put these forms of gratification off-limits to all their citizens. Texas has a different approach. Its criminal code, while permitting “deviate sexual intercourse” by heterosexual partners, outlaws it for homosexuals. If John and Tyra had been caught doing what John and Tyron were caught doing, the police would have been powerless to stop them.

      Even in Texas, though, no one enforces the law, no one expects it to be enforced, and hardly anyone wants it to be enforced. There are some 43,000 gay and lesbian couples in the Lone Star State, according to the last census, as well as thousands of other homosexual individuals who may pair off on any given night. A gay population with even a minimally active libido would present a law enforcement challenge beyond measure.

      But occasionally police stumble onto illegal conduct, and then the law turns out to be more than a dead letter. For Garner and Lawrence, there was the indignity of being jailed, hauled into court and fined for consensual acts carried out in private. On top of that, their lawyers note, they are now disqualified or restricted “from practicing dozens of professions in Texas, from physician to athletic trainer to bus driver.” If they move to some states, they’ll have to register as sex offenders.

      The two men have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, insisting that the law violates their right to privacy and discriminates against them on unconscionable grounds, and the court has agreed to hear the case. They say states have no business telling adults what intimacies they may choose to enjoy, and certainly can’t deny specific pleasures to gays while allowing them to straights.

      Either theory would require the court to stake out new constitutional ground. Just 16 years ago, it upheld a Georgia man’s sodomy conviction, ridiculing the idea that he had “a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.” It has yet to treat discrimination against gays as the equivalent of discrimination against blacks or women.

      But there are good grounds for putting this type of regulation off-limits. The court has long accepted that the Constitution establishes an unassailable zone of individual privacy. In 1965, it said the government can’t forbid contraceptives to married people, and later it said the same for people who haven’t tied the knot.

      Supporters of the law object that the Constitution says nothing about sexual privacy. But the 9th Amendment says the reference to specific liberties in the Bill of Rights “shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Recognizing those other rights is the task of the Supreme Court. Given modern notions of sexual autonomy, it makes perfect sense for the court to find that the government has no business telling consenting adults what they can put where.

      The Texas prosecutors argue that we can outlaw gay sodomy because we’ve always outlawed gay sodomy. “Fundamental rights must be grounded in the nation’s history and legal traditions,” they say, and in this case, history and tradition support the ban. But discrimination against women has its own basis in history and tradition, and even conservatives today show no interest in making the case that the government can treat half the human race as an inferior species.

      Laws against sodomy are just as outmoded. No state actually enforces these laws the way other laws are enforced. Why? Because very few Americans see policing the bedroom as a legitimate function of government.

      We as a people already accept that sexual freedom and privacy are fundamental rights of every rational adult. Maybe the Supreme Court is ready to do likewise.

       Sunday, January 5, 2003

      Cokie Roberts recently left her post as co-anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning news show, “This Week,” and I’m happy to say I won’t miss her. That’s not because I don’t like her — in fact, I like her a lot — but because I never watch the show, or its competitors. On this, she and I are in perfect agreement: Both of us think our lives are better without “This Week.”

      Why did she leave a job most journalists would run over their grandmothers to get? In an interview on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Roberts said it was simple: “Because I had reached a point in my life when it was time for me not to be getting up at 5:00 every Sunday and going to work, and then coming back and going to church, and then taking a nap, and not really having the opportunity to spend time with people I wanted to spend time with, mainly my family.”

      As it happens, “This Week” conflicts with my paramount Sunday morning obligation, which is taking my 11-year-old daughter to the local ice arena so she can practice her figure skating. But that’s not really my reason for not watching. Truth is, I’d rather go to an empty rink and stare at the ice than subject myself to those programs.

      In many journalistic circles, it is considered a solemn obligation, and even a pleasure, to pass Sunday morning in front of the tube. The only acceptable excuse for not watching the talk shows is if you’re actually participating in one of them — something no one has ever been addled enough to invite me to do. In my younger days as a journalist, I used to make a habit of tuning in, feeling it was essential to keeping abreast of national events and writing well-informed commentary.

      But eventually it became apparent to me that what I was gaining in information, I was losing in perspective. I was mistaking the current for the important.

      I often got so caught up in what the chairman of the House

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