Some corrections are in order to our guest blog on Altercation today, submitted from Shanghai.

First, in saving the html version of what we wrote to Word, so we could send it as an attachment to MSNBC, our computer (not MSNBC's, they are blameless) changed some dashes to underlines in the urls to two of the linked-to articles, and as a result those hot-links don't work.

Here is the correct link to the news story about China's about-face on AIDS .

And here is the correct link to the article, High Court To Review Race-Based Admissions

As to the Supreme Court review of the Texas sodomy law case, thanks to PG and KevDC for pointing out that the Supreme Court Monday agreed to hear the case (we incorrectly stated that arguments were held Monday)--and that Lawrence v. Texas is the name of the Texas case the Court agreed to hear Monday, not the name of the 1986 case previously decided by the court in a split ruling(we botched that one in our editing.)

So much for blogging from China before dawn and editing on airplanes....our apologies to all. We'll try to do better tomorrow when we are again filling in for Eric, this time from Denver.

Also, thanks to Instapundit for his warm compliment on our Altercation guest blog today (even though he, too, noticed our error but was kind enough not to mention it.) Instapundit thinks the Texas sodomy law is dumb and backs it up with a law review article he and Dave Koppel wrote in 2000 on state police powers in general with a particular focus on sodomy laws.

The article has many worth-reading quotes from actual cases striking down sodomy laws. Such as:

"The individual's right to freely exercise his or her liberty is not dependent upon whether the majority believes such exercise to be moral, dishonorable, or wrong. Simply because something is beyond the pale of "majoritarian morality" does not place it beyond the scope of constitutional protection. To allow the moral indignation of a majority (or, even worse, a loud and/or radical minority) to justify criminalizing private consensual conduct would be a strike against freedoms paid for and preserved by our forefathers. Majority opinion should never dictate a free society's willingness to battle for the protection of its citizens' liberties. To allow such a thing would, in and of itself, be an immoral and insulting affront to our constitutional democracy." Powell v. State, 510 S.E.2d 18, 27 (Ga. 1998) and

"Simply because the majority, speaking through the General Assembly, finds one type of extramarital intercourse more offensive than another, does not provide a rational basis for criminalizing the sexual preference of homosexuals." Commonwealth v. Wasson, 842 S.W.2d at 502 (Kentucky) and

"The usual justification for laws against such conduct is that, even though it does not injure any identifiable victim, it contributes to moral deterioration of society. One need not endorse wholesale repeal of all "victimless" crimes in order to recognize that legislating penal sanctions solely to maintain widely held concepts of morality and aesthetics is a costly enterprise. It sacrifices personal liberty, not because the actor's conduct results in harm to another citizen but only because it is inconsistent with the majoritarian notion of acceptable behavior." Wasson at 498.