Maya Angelou once advised, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” That quote came to mind the other day when I heard Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn declare in a video that married Americans should not be free to use contraceptives.
Yup, that’s the gist of what she said – further evidence (as if anyone with even minimal cognitive skills needs to be reminded) that today’s GOP, with its toxic stew of Trumpist authoritarianism and Taliban-style intolerance, is a clear and present danger. If you think that the cult, armed with its culture war hit list, will be satisfied with merely erasing the abortion rights encoded in Roe v. Wade, then you haven’t been paying attention.
Blackburn, in her weekend video, was targeting Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson when she told her constituents, “Constitutionally unsound rulings like Griswold vs. Connecticut…confused Tennesseans and left Congress wondering who gave the court permission to bypass our system of checks and balances. It is the 11th hour and Judge Jackson’s stance on the Constitution remains a secret.”
Ah, there it is: A frontal assault on America’s long-established right of privacy.
Social conservatives in the GOP have begun to take aim at the Supreme Court’s landmark 1965 Griswold decision. They indeed believe the case was “constitutionally unsound” – despite the fact that seven of the nine justices cited five different Bill of Rights amendments while ruling that married people who wish to use birth control have a right to “marital privacy.” The majority opinion said: “We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights – older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.” (The high court extended this zone of privacy to unmarried couples in 1972.)
Right-wingers had long been reluctant to attack Griswold, because it just so happens that the right to privacy in intimate decision-making is a very popular concept. As far back as 1937, a Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans supported the birth control movement. In 2010, according to CBS News poll, only 11 percent of Americans said that birth control had changed family life for the worse, and only 9 percent said it had changed women’s lives for the worse. In other words, there’s scant public support for the notion that government, federal or state, should be allowed to meddle in private contraceptive matters.
But now the GOP’s Taliban wing couldn’t care less what most people want, or how a 7-2 high court majority decisively ruled. When reactionaries like Blackburn decree that Griswold was “constitutionally unsound,” what they’re really saying is that states should have the power to turn back the clock and stop sexually active people from buying contraception.
That was the message last month in Michigan, when three Republicans vying for the job of state attorney general squared off in a debate. All three agreed that the Griswold ruling trampled on “state’s rights” – namely, the power of states to invade people’s sexual privacy if the states saw fit. Indeed, for social conservatives, Griswold and Roe are peas in a pod; they say that the former in 1965 paved the way for the latter in 1973, and that if Roe goes down (perhaps this spring, thanks to the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court) then Griswold should be doomed as well.
Their moral code is that sex should be for procreative purposes only. If that sounds suspiciously like the 1950s or some other vanished era, that is indeed what they intend. (How that squares with their complaint that poor people have too many babies is a mystery to me.) The bottom line is that liberals and progressives who seem determined to sit out the 2022 midterm elections have been warned again and again and again that the Trump-Taliban cult is playing for all the marbles and delights in the opposition’s insipid apathy.
Blackburn, during the Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, said to Kentaji Brown Jackson, “I can only wonder – what’s your hidden agenda?” Her question was not designed to elicit an answer; it was merely posed to sow dark suspicions. But we don’t need to wonder about the Trump-Taliban agenda. It’s the antithesis of hidden.