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Comment by seanw444 | Hacker News Reader

The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point, but I agree with the rest. It is really just a "I'm too comfortable and lazy to do anything to better the rest of civilization."

It's the same thing with guns. If you're a fudd and you have your grandpa's old hunting rifle, but you think AR-15s are "stupid and pointless and only the uncorruptable government should be trusted with them!" and you refuse to stand up for their rights when tyrannical law strikes, then they won't be there to back you up when they inevitably come for your hunting rifle.

Same for privacy and encryption, and getting off of big tech services and platforms. If enough of us get off now, we can be a force for change. But most people are content with sharing everyone they hang out with, what food they eat for every meal, and all of their life details publicly every day.

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> The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point

FWIW, adding sexuality and race was intentional. Why? Because of the briefs by the justices associate with the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v Wade. Specifically because the same privacy protections which protected RvW also protected gay and interracial marriages.

And that privacy protection was explicitly and intentionally nullified, as called out by Justice Clarence Thomas.

So, in the immediate term, one's sexuality and race is explicitly at risk.

What Clarence Thomas is saying is that these decisions shouldn't have been made by the supreme court, not that these things shouldn't be allowed. In his view these decisions require the legislative branch to rule on, not nine lifetime appointed judges. I'm not sure I entirely agree that the constitution has zero room for implied rights, but that's where I think he's coming from.

Edit: the Crux of the issue is that the supreme court can just as easily make bad rulings as they can good ones. To pick an admittedly dated but relevant example, the supreme court once ruled that black people are property and must be returned to their "owner", regardless of the laws of the state they were currently in.

Or we could just say "supreme court justice hates minorities and gay people and wants to make his own (interracial) marriage illegal." Who needs nuance?

> The sexuality and race is kind of irrelevant to the point, but I agree with the rest.

Thank you for speaking up. For some reason, some people think that generalizing negative attributes to some groups is fine. It is not. If you claim that behaviors/attributes are had by race/gender/other-unrelated-attribute you are part of the problem.

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