1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.
These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.
2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.
Leading “libertarian” activists say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public. This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.
3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.
With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide) is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).
5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate.
