Christian Conservatives vs. Sex: The Long War Over Reproductive Freedom

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/sex/155226/christian_conservatives_vs._sex%3A_the_long_war_over_reproductive_freedom/

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On Nov. 1, 1961, Estelle Griswold and Dr. Charles Lee Buxton did something radical: They opened a clinic in New Haven, Conn., to dispense birth control information.

Nine days later, police raided the clinic and arrested Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Buxton, chairman of the obstetrics department at Yale Medical School.

Buxton and Griswold weren’t surprised. In fact, they had been expecting to be arrested all along. Their decision to open a birth control clinic in New Haven was a deliberately provocative act, designed to test a law originally passed in Connecticut in 1879 that banned artificial forms of contraceptives in the state for everyone – even married couples.

Connecticut’s anti-birth control statute was only being sporadically enforced at the time, and some types of birth control were available in drug stores. But Buxton and Griswold believed that as long as the law was in place, access to contraceptives wasn’t secure.

[JHB]

1. Whenever RWes complain about "activist judges inventing rights"...

...it goes back to Griswold v Connecticut and the right to privacy.

And that, they argue, is not a right, and sex is where government can get as "big" as it pleases (as long as it pleases them).

It all comes back to what they think is the best way to police unauthorized sex. (Questioning that they have any right to do either the policing or authorizing is pretty much proof of what a degenerate you are.)

[wordpix]

3. leave it to asexual male priests praying to an invisible man to ban birth control & abortions

That's a good policy for women

[struggle4progress]

4. The 1879 Connecticut law, overturned by Griswald, originally passed at a time

when anti-Catholic prejudice was wide-spread in Connecticut: that law was not work of "asexual male priests" from the Catholic church, but rather the work of conservative Connecticut Protestants