Could any house be more a home than the Dery and Kelo homes? Could the government commit a deeper offense against the right of private property than to seize these homes for a developer?
This is theft by government. But it is also something worse: It is a frontal assault on the primacy in our culture of the privately owned family home, the universally sought-after symbol and stronghold of American liberty. In authorizing this larceny, the five justices in the court's majority -- J.P. Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Ginsburg and David Souter -- have revealed where true liberty ranks in the liberal judiciary's hierarchy of values.
If the Fort Trumbull families had been members of an endangered animal species, their homes might have been spared. Had New London tried to bulldoze bog-turtle habitat, liberal judges likely would have blocked it.
If the buildings had not been family homes, but "family planning clinics," where abortions were performed in the name of a "right to privacy," liberal judges would at least have been conflicted.
But because New London believes it can extract more tax money from a hotel-and-office development than it can from certain homes, the Supreme Court will let the city take the homes and destroy them. What a blighted view of public welfare New London and the court have adopted: An office building that can be built somewhere else -- if there is a market for it -- can never be as rich a community asset as the roots set down by Fort Trumbull's families.
These families were loyal to New London, but New London was not loyal to them.
The value of a private home, in Fort Trumbull -- or any American town -- cannot be counted in dollars and cents. It is sovereign territory, where law-abiding people sit free and independent, beyond the reach of a constitutionally limited government.
Or so it used to be.