False equivalence. Adultery is not a crime. Trafficking in child pornography is. Nobody has a right to private criminality.
Also, the argument presented does not make a distinction between legal and illegal usage.
In reality, almost nobody who thinks they believe in an absolute right to privacy really believes that.
That's exactly what the 4th is meant to draw a line around: If you can't detect the crime without building a pervasive surveillance state, it probably shouldn't be a crime and we're going to make it hard to detect and prosecute. "Private criminality" is an oxymoron.
Making abortion illegal is way into the territory of the criminalization of supposedly "private criminality." So would be the outlawing of encryption without back doors.
This makes no sense to me at all. It is, for instance, incredibly difficult to track and prosecute child pornographers.
Are you referring to the buy-side of CP? Yes, that's hard. But those are also the low-value targets. They would mostly get rolled-up once a producer of CP is caught, no?
Well, on the face of the statutes, yes, but unlike statutes criminalizing adultery, those criminalizing consensual sodomy have been pretty clearly struck down as unconstitutional, so the fact that they remain "on the books" does not actually mean that they are criminal, since the law purporting to make them so is itself invalid.
(There's some debate about the Constitutional status of adultery statutes, but AFAIK no federal court has yet stuck them down for violating the federal Constitution.)
The United States is one of few industrialized countries to have laws criminalizing adultery. In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Up until the mid 20th century most US states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.
No, that's not true.
> The United States is one of few industrialized countries to have laws criminalizing adultery. In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Up until the mid 20th century most US states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.
True (and, unlike the first sentence, a direct quote from Wikipedia) but also potentially misleading as to the trend with regard to adultery specifically by lumping together those three different things into a collective group.
[0] To the extent anything is prohibited by an unconstitutional "law" that cannot be enforced.
More importantly, I wanted to reframe your comment in a way that was productive. Instead of "Nobody has a right to private criminality.", it seems more conversational to say "Nobody has a right to private amorality."