So, Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about allowing states to take away the right to use contraceptives because no states is talking about doing that.
OK, then! Well, Mitt Romney still wants to allow states to take away the right for you to engage in oral sex. And some very prominent people are still talking about that -- including Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who believes that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution and that states should be able to regulate any human behavior that they consider to be immoral simply because they disapprove: "the ick factor." (Note: some exceptions apply when it comes to interference with commerce.)
And Mitt Romney loves him some Antonin Scalia -- in a perfectly chaste way.
Don't believe me? Go back and read Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the ability of states to ban "sodomy." Here, I included the relevant section after the jump.
From Scalia's dissent in Lawrence (citations omitted):
Countless judicial decisions and legislative enactments have relied on the ancient proposition that a governing majority’s belief that certain sexual behavior is “immoral and unacceptable” constitutes a rational basis for regulation. State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. See ante, at 11 (noting “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex” (emphasis added)). The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional “morals” offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge. “The law,” it said, “is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the Due Process Clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.”
What a massive disruption of the current social order, therefore, the overruling of Bowers entails. Not so the overruling of Roe, which would simply have restored the regime that existed for centuries before 1973, in which the permissibility of and restrictions upon abortion were determined legislatively State-by-State. Casey, however, chose to base its stare decisis determination on a different “sort” of reliance. “[P]eople,” it said, “have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” This falsely assumes that the consequence of overruling Roe would have been to make abortion unlawful. It would not; it would merely have permitted the States to do so. Many States would unquestionably have declined to prohibit abortion, and others would not have prohibited it within six months (after which the most significant reliance interests would have expired). Even for persons in States other than these, the choice would not have been between abortion and childbirth, but between abortion nearby and abortion in a neighboring State.
(Now that would certainly change the argument about homosexuality, wouldn't it? By the way, did you know that Lawrence was not only the case that banned laws against homosexual relations, but that also banned laws against heterosexuals from engaging in oral sex and other flavors? That's right, you can't make it a right for homosexuals without making it a right for everyone; that's called "equal protection." So the next time you're doing something non-traditional in bed, or "in bed," thank Mr. Lawrence.)
Anyway, I'm willing to let Mitt Romney get away with not promising that he won't appoint Justices who will prevent states from banning the use of contraceptives -- or of quadruple negatives, for that matter; you can summarize the above as "he'll won't rule out appointing justices who agree with Scalia and Romney's rival "Hapless Rick" Santorum -- because, for Pete's sake, it's not a "live issue." But I want to hear Mitt comment about this: should states be allowed to bar consenting adults from performing oral sex. Or, for that matter, from receiving oral sex. (Or from giving and receiving simultaneously or in sequence.) Lots of people (many of them hypocrites, many of them damaged, many of them blasphemously claiming intimate knowledge of the desires of the creator of the universe, many of them exulting in the use of state power for social control of the masses, many of them just squicked out) want to do this. I assert that Mitt Romney is among them. I mean, if he won't even actually out and say that he won't protect the right to use contraception, then it stands to reason, doesn't it?
So, Mitt Romney is OK with the states preventing people from engaging in oral sex or anything other than "vanilla" penis-vagina sex in a position that does not distract you from thinking about God. Let the word go forth. Let the voters decide. (By the way, in an era of live-streaming, we might expect better enforcement of such a law against men who pay for it. Just saying.)
I highlighted the word "masturbation" in Scalia's dissent because here I think that Romney may actually disagree with him. I do not think that Romney is believes in principle that states can outlaw masturbation; he just thinks that states should be restricted to cases where the person masturbating is thinking about sex while doing so. It's OK if one gets off while thinking about unregulated corporations making huge profits at the expense of the public. Corporations are people, my friend.