Catchy headline, isn’t it? Think it’s impossible? Think it can’t happen here in America? Think again. This is what our Senators are saying, and what they intend for you.
Senator Rick Santorum’s got some opinions to share, and I think it’s time you listen up and pay attention – before it’s too late.
How did this all start? Several “strands” of major Supreme Court decisions, bound together, have dismantled older constitutional understandings and enshrined the new morality. On the questions of marriage, family, and sex, that string begins with the 1965 Griswold decision. In that case, a Connecticut law that outlawed the use of contraceptives, even by married couples, was ruled unconstitutional. Now, before you jump to conclusions, let me clearly state that this law was badly written, and I would not have supported it or its intent. Nonetheless, it is in this case that the Court “discovered” a “right to privacy” in the U.S. Constitution. Of course, such a right does not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution. Rather, the Court’s majority discovered — or invented — such a right from the “emanations” and “penumbras” of rights found in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
It is significant that what seems to have been decisive in the minds of some of the justices in the Griswold majority was actually something quite traditional in the common law: the notion that marriage was a privileged institution into which law should not interfere. The case involved Planned Parenthood dispensing contraceptives to a married couple, and throughout the decision, it was marital privacy that was discussed. So, an aspect of the traditional moral view was a motivation for the Court’s majority decision: But the jurisprudential novelty it established — the right to privacy — would quickly become a constitutional wrecking ball.
Justices Stewart and Black were scathing in dissent, observing that while both disagreed with the law personally (as do I), they could find nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prevented the Connecticut legislature from making such a law (which had been on the books in the state since 1879). The dissenting justices mocked the reasoning of the majority, which in some cases based itself not on the Constitution’s text, but rather on the “traditions and [collective] conscience of our people.” How, asked the dissenters, could the Court know the conscience of the people better than legislators? Did not such reliance lead only to the substitution of judges’ “personal and private notions” for the decisions of legislatures? “Use of any such broad, unbounded judicial authority would make of this Court’s members a day-to-day constitutional convention,” warned Justice Black. And so it has been! Finally, Justice Black observed that “privacy” is a “broad, abstract and ambiguous concept,” lacking the specificity of a genuinely constitutional rule. However traditional it may appear in the guise of marital privacy, which as a legislator I support, this novel right was bound to do harm in our jurisprudence.
And so it was and so it did. Just seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), the Court struck down a Massachusetts law that made contraception legal only for married persons. The distinction between the married and unmarried was breached, and the “right of privacy” became unhinged, essentially protecting (heterosexual) sex, as such, from any moral regulation.
Again, although I disagree with the Massachusetts law and its intent, the Court’s solution to the problem presented by such a law was neither judicious nor prudent: The Court in effect codified the sexual revolution then underway — with the supremely powerful protection of a constitutional right. Marital privacy had now morphed into “the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” The arguably traditional marital dimension upon which the Court had discovered the new “privacy right” was simply dropped with respect to having heterosexual intercourse. Rather than encouraging the legislature to repeal an outdated law, the Court expanded further the ungrounded right to privacy.
The next step, of course, was Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision of 1973. Today, most honest constitutional experts agree that as constitutional law, this decision is a monstrosity, a pure act of judicial legislating with no warrant in the Constitution’s text. Having invented a “right to privacy,” a right with a special emphasis on sexual matters, the Court was driven by its new moral logic to extend protection to what was all too often the result of the new sexual ethic: unwanted pregnancies and their “termination.”
The Roe decision established an elaborate system of “trimesters” of pregnancy and delimited when the states might and might not have a “compelling interest” in protecting the life of the unborn, “balanced” against the “privacy right” of the mother. In immediately subsequent decisions, however, this elaborate system quickly became meaningless, a dead letter. By the Supreme Court’s lights, no legislative regulation of abortion was permissible, for abortion was, after all, a “fundamental right.” What could possible count as a legitimate weight in the balance against a “fundamental right”? In effect, Roe created a private license to kill a certain category of Americans, the unborn, and raised this license to a constitutional principle.
The strands of these Court cases had made the rope thick. The legal reasoning continued to evolve, and the right to (sexual) privacy approached its terminal point. In the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Court handed down a complex ruling on a Pennsylvania state law that sought to reduce the number of abortions by a whole set of restrictive measures. The Casey decision actually stepped back from some of the most extreme Court decisions that followed Roe: Certain measures to ensure “informed consent” are now ruled constitutional, for example. But finally, the Court would not allow any legislation in America that would actually prevent a woman from procuring an abortion she desired. That is the bottom line. And the reason for this is found in the so-called “mystery passage.” It formed the basis of the ruling: “At the heart of liberty,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The privacy right had now been expanded to its philosophical extreme.
Moral capital involves shared moral aspirations and norms, which for most of our founders was our human, legislative effort to approximate a transcendent moral order. I have been arguing that such moral capital is part of the common good. Here, however, the court tells us that liberty must mean that there is no common good: Each of us is locked in the prison of our own self-created moral universe. We are, each of us, lords of the world, divine legislators. There is no transcendent truth, no common truth, just myriad individual truths.
Where does the right to privacy go from here? As our culture continues to “progress” and old inhibitions are cast off, what boundaries — what guardrails — will be left? In his 1995 book Rethinking Life and Death, Princeton professor Peter Singer liberates moral theory and practice from any truths that pose an obstacle to our will to power and control. In that book he champions “neonaticide” — that is, the legal destruction of newborn human beings with physical handicaps up through the 28th day after birth. Singer has been dubbed by his critics “Professor Death” — but he professes his views from a tenured chair at Princeton.
Is Singer alone in promoting such a radical “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”? Unfortunately, he is not. Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, suggests that
we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. . . . [T]he right to life must come . . . from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect on ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die.
Under his definition a newborn is not human, and therefore the reality Pinker constructs would allow for neonaticide as well. Pinker points to that conclusion himself: “[S]everal moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons . . . and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder.”
How long will it be before the Supreme Court “discovers” that voices like Singer’s and Pinker’s, coming as they do from some of our most elite educational institutions, represent the evolving “[collective] conscience of our people” and bring us yet another expansion of the right to privacy?
(bold and underline emphasis mine).
Are you getting the picture yet? He doesn’t just oppose abortion - he opposes birth control. He opposes the fundamental right to privacy between a man and a woman. These zealots have no problem intruding into your life and trying to force their own religious beliefs upon you, whether you agree with them or not. This isn’t an exaggeration.
What more needs to be said? They won’t stop at abortion. This is about a woman’s fundamental right to choose *when* it is the right time for her to have a family, and it is clear that to these people, the woman should have no say at all.
Now partner that thought with the new ‘abstinence only sex education’ Bush is desperate to push on our children, and the picture gets even uglier. They don’t want our children to know how to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies, STDs, and AIDS.
That being said, I’d like to point out the dark truth of who these zealots really are. They *know* unwanted pregnancies are going to happen. They want them to. And as long as there are unwanted pregnancies, there will always be women desperate enough, or in dire enough circumstances to consider seeking out an abortion, whether it is illegal or not. These religious monsters don’t *care* that a woman’s life is at risk for being forced to go to an unsanitary, back-street butcher instead of a licensed medical doctor.
Right now, there are anti-abortion groups (some even funded by Bush) that masquerade as 'crisis pregnancy' centers. They pretend to be a women's health clinic but deliver heavy-handed anti-abortion messages and frequently outright lie when giving 'medical' information. They often use stall tactics to try to fool women into thinking they have more time to make their decisions than they really do.
Pharmacists are turning away rape victims from having access to emergency contraceptives and refusing to give their prescriptions back. All emergency contraceptives do is prevent ovulation or fertilization. They're refusing to even fill birth control prescriptions.
In February, another Texas pharmacist at an Eckerd drug store in Denton wouldn't give contraceptives to a woman who was said to be a rape victim. In the Madison case, pharmacist Neil Noesen, 30, after refusing to refill a birth-control prescription, did not transfer it to another pharmacist or return it to the woman. She was able to get her prescription refilled two days later at the same pharmacy, but she missed a pill because of the delay.
How is this the 'Christian' thing to do?
Considering the evidence I've presented above, who truly is the monster here? The woman who, when faced with the choice, tries to make the best decision for herself and her family, or the religious zealots who would rather their own children die of AIDS rather than use contraceptives? Fanatics who would rather a young girl bleed to death trying to get an illegal abortion rather than bear her father's child or the young girl herself?
A zygote matters more to these people than the woman who carries it.
It's that bad out there. You need to be paying attention. Remember all those sayings you used to hear? "A woman's place is in the kitchen." "All women should be barefoot and pregnant."
There are a powerful group of fanatics out there who have the ear of the president. They hold the highest political offices in this country - and they want those statements to be made true.
I've always advocated freedom of religion. It truly is a founding principle for America. Only now can I truly appreciate Jefferson's emphasis on freedom *from* religion as well. As the bumper sticker says, "God save me from your 'true believers'".
