Supreme Court went too far?

Jeffrey Rosen argues in The New Republic Online: Sex Appeal that the Supreme Court went too far in the recent Lawrence decision:

The Court could have struck down Texas’s sodomy law on the narrow grounds that it violated the equal protection of the laws by forbidding homosexual but not heterosexual sodomy. But instead the Court embraced and extended a sweeping and amorphous right to sexual liberty that is even harder to locate in the text or history of the Constitution than the right of reproductive autonomy that the Court discovered in Roe.

Generally speaking, I believe that adults should be able to do what they want in private assuming they are not hurting anyone. That said, this article makes a very good point: it is the job of the courts to interpret the law, and the Constitution does not go so far as to provide for the complete freedom that the Court has declared exists.

Now I see why there was an immediate action from the Republicans to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriages. Rosen argues that this Supreme Court decision will eventually harm liberals, because the conservatives will take immediate action in legislation if the lower courts start providing for things like gay marriage. I guess time will tell if that’s the case, but I think that this article does a great job illuminating the difference between interpreting the law (and the Constitution) and creating new law.