Sleepers awake!

"It's alive! It's ALIVE!" You'll remember the line from the movie Frankenstein. It must have been such a moment when Clarence Thomas broke a decade of silence and started asking questions from the bench. I notice this morning that the pundits are now taking notice of just what questions and why he asked them.

Interrupting Justice Department attorney Ilana Eisenstein in a case involving the constitutionality of abridging the second amendment rights of a convicted wife beater he asked whether she could provide any other example of a constitutional right being suspended because of a misdemeanor.  Now one can infer bias here, or one can realize that this is a legitimate constitutional quandary  Certainly it can be seen as being in the public interest to curtail the gun ownership privileges of someone convicted of assault, but there's the rub:  in the US it's not a privilege, it's a right.  I'm guessing that Thomas the Prank Engine* is going to decide that a misdemeanor isn't sufficient cause to curtail a man's God given Constitutional rights.

Now I could go off on several tangents related to a woman's right to be protected from having the crap beat out of her by her husband, but you'll get the point without my help.  My question and probably the court's question will be to decide what it takes to  "infinge" upon constitutional rights.  Many other second order questions will arise, no doubt, relative to what it takes to infringe on the right to vote or to be exempted from aspects of public employment because of religious feelings, but we have to face it: the right to keep and bear arms is seen by many as the keystone right, a fulcrum of liberty about which all other rights revolve.

I don't belittle the question itself: the question of  just how bad one must be to have one's rights stripped temporarily or permanently, but the question about which this case revolves is how strong is the right to be protected from harm, or is that to be seen by the court as a guarantee at all?

Can we treat the right to gun ownership and the right to carry one about as a privilege as we do with the privilege of driving a car?  The 'original intent' seems to be no and if silent Thom is about to decide thusly, perhaps it's time to consider an amendment to the amendment, hard sell though it may be.


* I refer to the incident of  the Justice putting his pubic hair on a can of coke and asking Anita Hill who put it there.  Oh, don't give me that -- there were 4 witnesses.