Support Sen. Santorum: Oppose Legal Contraception

If Rick Santorum gets re-elected for his Senate seat in 2006, I will be astounded. I guess what this will mean is that PA has more INSANE voters than I realized.



Go to Crooks and Liars and check out the video of Santorum appearing on "News Night" with Aaron Brown at CNN.

Here is a snippet from the interview:

BROWN: Do you think there's a right to privacy in the Constitution?

SANTORUM: No -- well, not the right to privacy as created under Roe v. Wade and all...

BROWN: Do you think there's a right to privacy in the Constitution?

SANTORUM: I think there's a right to unreasonable -- to unreasonable search and seizure...

BROWN: For example, if you'd been a Supreme Court judge in Griswold versus Connecticut, the famous birth control case came up, which centered around whether there was a right to privacy. Do you believe that was correctly decided?

SANTORUM: No, I don't. I write about it in the book. I don't.

BROWN: The state of Connecticut had the right to ban birth control for a married couple.

SANTORUM: I think they were wrong. It was a bad law.

BROWN: But they had the right.

SANTORUM: They had the right. They had the right...

BROWN: Why would a conservative argue that government should interfere with that most personal decision?

SANTORUM: I didn't. I said it was a bad law. And...

BROWN: But they had the right to make.

SANTORUM: They had the right to make it. Look, legislatures have the right to make mistakes and do really stupid things...

If you elect Santorum he will crusade to ensure that states get to pass laws banning contraception people, even married people! Griswold vs. Conneticut appealed to the 4th and 5th Amendments. Here is a sample of Justice Douglas' opinion, which argued in favor of Griswold:

The present case, then, concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees. And it concerns a law which, in forbidding the use of contraceptives rather than regulating their manufacture or sale, seeks to achieve its goals by means having a maximum destructive impact upon that relationship. Such a law cannot stand in light of the familiar principle, so often applied by this Court, that a "governmental purpose to control or prevent activities constitutionally subject to state regulation may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms." NAACP v. Alabama, 377 U.S. 288, 307. Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.

I want to hear MORE from Santorum, what, exactly is problematic about this reasoning? Right-Wing Religious Conservatives, like Santorum, are anti-liberalism (in the classical sense!). Denying a right to privacy--especially in their own homes--sounds a great deal more like fascism than liberal democracy! Why, on earth, do you want to let the government--local, state or federal, interfere in how you raise your children, for example? Isn't Santorum, of all people, taking advantage of the freedom by home-schooling his children in Virginia (while using State dollars!)

I also find this strategy for attacking Roe, and now, Griswold, to be curious since a lot of Christian wack-o groups and cultural conservatives are opposing the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) (S 1197). A prevailing argument is that it destroys families. Here is a tasty bit from a 1999 treatie, "The Father's Manifesto":

VAWA was fabricated completely from whole cloth. Its sponsor’s purpose is to permanently separate men and women and destroy their families.

What is shows is that Conservatives like Santorum might use the rhetoric of "procedure," i.e. state legislatures have the right to make bad laws and the Supreme Court shouldn't interefere, but they are really pushing their "substantive views." This above quotation from the father's manifesto shows a deep concern with federal or state involvement in "families." And, yet Santorum and his friends would be all too happy to let federal and/or state legislatures: "allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives . . ."

The least I could ask for is that Santorum and his supporters stop dressing up their arguments in concerns over procedure and fess up to their real agenda.