NARAL Pro-Choice America, the nation's leading advocate of personal privacy and a woman's right to choose, said recent documents released by the National Archives from John Roberts' work as a top legal adviser under President Reagan reveal Roberts' hostility toward a constitutionally protected right to privacy.

Today's Washington Post reports on a memo regarding the landmark 1965 Supreme Court ruling that legalized the use of birth control by married couples under a right to privacy. According to the records, Roberts' memo "to the attorney general on Dec. 11, 1981, summarized a lecture six years earlier by then-Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold at Washington and Lee University, which touched on the same theme. Griswold's lecture, Roberts said, devotes a section to the so-called 'right to privacy,' arguing as we have that such an amorphous right is not to be found in the Constitution. He specifically criticizes Roe v. Wade."

"That John Roberts, President Bush's nominee to the highest court in the nation, should refer disparagingly to our 'so-called right to privacy' is extremely troubling. The right to privacy is central to our American ideals of liberty and personal freedom, and it's something most Americans cherish," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. "The more we learn about John Roberts' judicial philosophy, the clearer it becomes that he is not the right choice for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. With each new piece of information the White House's artfully constructed façade falls farther away, and the real John Roberts comes into clearer view – a career activist who would bring a clear ideological agenda to the Supreme Court. We need justices who will protect fundamental freedoms, not challenge them."

This doesn't sound like a man who respects precedent. Looking back to his Reagan Administration days, when Roberts apparently felt more free to speak his mind, The Boston Globe reports:

[Roberts] wrote vigorous defenses, for example, of the administration's version of a voting rights bill, opposed by Congress, which would have narrowed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He challenged the arguments of the US Commission on Civil Rights in favor of busing and affirmative action. He described a Supreme Court decision broadening the rights of individuals to sue states for civil rights violations as causing ''damage" to administration policies, and he urged that legislation be drafted to reverse it. And he wrote a memo arguing that it was constitutionally acceptable for Congress to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil rights cases.

There is a lot about this Supreme Court nominee's ideological zealotry in his career to be concerned about.

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