Opinion ID: 76651
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Asserted Right

Text: 10 The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The most familiar function of this Clause is to guarantee procedural fairness in the context of any deprivation of life, liberty, or property by the State. The users and vendors here do not claim to have been denied procedural due process. Instead, they rely on the Due Process Clause's substantive component, which courts have long recognized as providing heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights and liberty interests. Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 65, 120 S.Ct. 2054, 2060, 147 L.Ed.2d 49 (2000) (citation omitted). 11 The ACLU argues that the use of sexual devices is among those activities that, although not enumerated in the Constitution, are protected under the concept of substantive due process. According to the ACLU, the State of Alabama, through its prohibition on the commercial distribution of sex toys qua sex toys, has intruded into the most intimate of places — the bedrooms of its citizens — and the lawful sexual conduct that occurs therein. While the statute's reach does not directly proscribe the sexual conduct in question, it places — without justification — a substantial and undue burden on the ability of the plaintiffs to obtain devices regulated by the statute. By restricting sales of these devices to plaintiffs, Alabama has acted in violation of the fundamental rights of privacy and personal autonomy that protect an individual's lawful sexual practices guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. 12 Williams III, at 1261 (quoting the ACLU's amended complaint). 13 The ACLU invokes privacy and personal autonomy as if such phrases were constitutional talismans. In the abstract, however, there is no fundamental right to either. See, e.g., Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 725, 117 S.Ct. at 2270 (fundamental rights are not simply deduced from abstract concepts of personal autonomy). Undoubtedly, many fundamental rights currently recognized under Supreme Court precedent touch on matters of personal autonomy and privacy. However, [t]hat many of the rights and liberties protected by the Due Process Clause sound in personal autonomy does not warrant the sweeping conclusion that any and all important, intimate, and personal decisions are so protected. Id. at 727, 117 S.Ct. at 2271. Such rights have been denominated fundamental not simply because they implicate deeply personal and private considerations, but because they have been identified as deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, such that neither liberty nor justice would exist if they were sacrificed. Id. at 720-21, 117 S.Ct. at 2268 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). 14 Nor, contrary to the ACLU's assertion, have the Supreme Court's substantive-due-process precedents recognized a free-standing right to sexual privacy. The Court has been presented with repeated opportunities to identify a fundamental right to sexual privacy — and has invariably declined. See, e.g., Carey v. Population Servs. Int'l, 431 U.S. 678, 688 n. 5, 97 S.Ct. 2010, 2018 n. 5, 52 L.Ed.2d 675 (1977) (noting that the Court has not definitively answered the difficult question whether and to what extent the Constitution prohibits state statutes regulating private consensual sexual behavior among adults, and we do not purport to answer that question now) (internal citation and punctuation omitted). Although many of the Court's privacy decisions have implicated sexual matters, see, e.g., Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S.Ct. 2791, 120 L.Ed.2d 674 (1992) (abortion); Carey, 431 U.S. at 678, 97 S.Ct. at 2010 (contraceptives), the Court has never indicated that the mere fact that an activity is sexual and private entitles it to protection as a fundamental right. 15 The Supreme Court's most recent opportunity to recognize a fundamental right to sexual privacy came in Lawrence v. Texas, where petitioners and amici expressly invited the court to do so. 4 That the Lawrence Court had declined the invitation was this court's conclusion in our recent decision in Lofton v. Sec. of Dept. of Children and Family Servs., 358 F.3d 804, 815-16 (11th Cir.2004). In Lofton, we addressed in some detail the question of whether Lawrence identified a new fundamental right to private sexual intimacy. 5 Id. at 815. We concluded that, although Lawrence clearly established the unconstitutionality of criminal prohibitions on consensual adult sodomy, it is a strained and ultimately incorrect reading of Lawrence to interpret it to announce a new fundamental right — whether to homosexual sodomy specifically or, more broadly, to all forms of sexual intimacy. Id. at 817. We noted in particular that the Lawrence opinion did not employ fundamental-rights analysis and that it ultimately applied rational-basis review, rather than strict scrutiny, to the challenged statute. Id. at 816-17. 6 16 The dissent seizes on scattered dicta from Lawrence to argue that Lawrence recognized a substantive due process right of consenting adults to engage in private intimate sexual conduct, such that all infringements of this right must be subjected to strict scrutiny. 7 As we noted in Lofton, we are not prepared to infer a new fundamental right from an opinion that never employed the usual Glucksberg analysis for identifying such rights. Id. at 816. Nor are we prepared to assume that Glucksberg — a precedent that Lawrence never once mentions — is overruled by implication. 17 The dissent in turn argues that the right recognized in Lawrence was a longstanding right that preexisted Lawrence, thus obviating the need for any Glucksberg -type fundamental rights analysis. But the dissent never identifies the source, textual or precedential, of such a preexisting right to sexual privacy. It does cite Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe , and Carey. However, although these precedents recognize various substantive rights closely related to sexual intimacy, none of them recognize the overarching right to sexual privacy asserted here. Griswold (marital privacy and contraceptives); Eisenstadt (equal protection extension of Griswold ); Roe (abortion); Carey (contraceptives). As we noted above, in the most recent of these decisions, Carey, the Court specifically observed that it had not answered the question of whether there is a constitutional right to private sexual conduct. 8 431 U.S. at 688 n. 5, 97 S.Ct. at 2018 n. 5. Moreover, nearly two decades later, the Glucksberg Court, listing the current catalog of fundamental rights, did not include such a right. 521 U.S. at 720, 117 S.Ct. at 2267. 18 In short, we decline to extrapolate from Lawrence and its dicta a right to sexual privacy triggering strict scrutiny. To do so would be to impose a fundamental-rights interpretation on a decision that rested on rational-basis grounds, that never engaged in Glucksberg analysis, and that never invoked strict scrutiny. Moreover, it would be answering questions that the Lawrence Court appears to have left for another day. Of course, the Court may in due course expand Lawrence 's precedent in the direction anticipated by the dissent. But for us preemptively to take that step would exceed our mandate as a lower court. 9