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Alito's Secret Pinko Past!"[A]ction must be taken on many fronts now to preserve privacy."

By Timothy Noah
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, at 6:27 PM ET

The Nov. 2 Boston Globe reports that back in 1971, when Samuel Alito, President Bush's new Supreme Court nominee, was a senior at Princeton, he

chaired an undergraduate task force that recommended the decriminalization of sodomy, accused the CIA and the FBI of invading the privacy of citizens, and said discrimination against gays in hiring ''should be forbidden."

"Task force" may be overstating things a bit. The Globe goes on to explain that the document this "task force" produced was an assignment for a class. The "task force" had 16 members, and Alito wasn't the one who wrote the section on gay rights. Still, Alito was the chairman, and presumably if he'd thought anything in the group's findings promoted actions that were an abomination before the Creator, he would have taken them out. In a forward that Alito himself wrote, he sounds like a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union:

We all believe that privacy is too often sacrificed to other values; we all believe that the threat to privacy is steadily and rapidly mounting; we all believe that action must be taken on many fronts now to preserve privacy.

Godfrey Daniels! "Privacy" is a word that the Christian fundamentalist right never, ever likes to hear a Supreme Court nominee utter, because it raises the distant possibility that the utterer recognizes a constitutional right to privacy, and from there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to condoning abortion. We have strong reason to believe that isn't the case with Alito. But you can't be too careful! James Dobson, are you going to take this lying down? Alito's fussiness about the CIA and the FBI harassing U.S. citizens sounds troublesome, too. Is Alito going to turn out to be one of those due-process weenies in the war on terrorism? Dick Cheney, how could you let this softie slip past you?

I can only imagine what unexploded bombshells would be found in Alito's missing senior thesis, if only it weren't conveniently "missing" from the Princeton archives. Subpoena the damned thing! We'll throw Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman into jail if we have to! What, Shirley? You say you can't find it? Can you say "Judy Miller"?

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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