The Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which made contraceptives widely available on the ground of privacy, was announced 50-years ago today.
Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.
Upton Sinclair
It is almost impossible to believe that birth control was widely unavailable in the United States just 50-years ago, and that Sinclair’s books could not be sent through the mail because he was a strong supporter of birth control. It is even harder to believe that there are people who want to take it away, some who even condemn it as the gateway to same-sex marriage. That one puzzles me; do they think men said to themselves, “Now that I can have worry-free sex with women, I might as well have sex with only men from now on”?
There’s no question that the Pious mean to take away birth control, if they can. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but this is not a bad time to stop to reflect about what life really looks like when the Godly are running things, and to resolve that it will not happen again.