Wrap your brains around this. All three Republican candidates for Michigan Attorney General support reversing the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut.
I also found it amazing that all three of these wannabe head attorneys for an entire state struggled to even remember what the Griswold case was. It’s one of those big cases extensively covered in Constitutional Law 101 in law school.
Prior to the Griswold decision the state of Connecticut had a law making it a criminal offense to use “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” Yes, those really are the exact words of the statute. So the law would criminalize birth control pills, IUDs and even “male contraception” such as condoms or possibly even vasectomies.
In the particular facts of the case, the prosecutors didn’t have the guts to go after the married couples who sought to use such contraception. Rather, the married couples sought the advice of a physician who gave them advice on contraception. The physician was then prosecuted and convicted for “aiding and abetting” the un-prosecuted married couples.
The Supreme Court 7-2 declared the Connecticut law an unconstitutional infringement on “marital privacy.” Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird the court extended this Constitutional protection to unmarried couples.
Of course, the three wannabe Attorney Generals for Michigan can’t tolerate this whole “right to privacy” thing because that leads to abortion rights and gay rights and all matter of sinful whatnot. A right to privacy only extends to having unregistered guns in their view. Well that and not being compelled to prove your vaccination status, but I digress.
Of course, the real point of such laws is to advance the putatively “Biblical” notion that the proper role of women in society is to be breeders and mothers, and not much else. Women can be best removed from day to day society, and the workplace, by compelling them into those roles. Connecticut’s law was itself a reflection of the Federal Comstock law, which for those seeking The Handmaid’s Tale metaphors, read in part like this:
Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose . . . shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned not more than five years, or both [if sent through the mail].
These are the “good old days” Republicans seek for this nation to return. It’s a time when contraception, any contraception, was deemed “indecent or immoral.”
These are the same people declaring “my body my choice” and “freedom” in regard to vaccines and masking mandates aimed at keeping them from killing others. In their world, freedom is for men, not women.