You know which Supreme Court case doesn’t get enough respect?
The holding in that case was that a Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy. Yes, this was actually an issue at one time. It was decided in 1965, by the way, which will be important later. It sounds like such a little thing, doesn’t it? The idea that two married people (which, in 1965, would perforce have been man and wife) could use a condom or a pessary or one of those new-fangled pills the kids were on (The combined oral birth control pill, aka The Pill, was introduced in 1960.) seems so utterly unremarkable to us now that it hardly seems imaginable that anyone could make a Federal case out of it in the Electrified Era, let alone after The Beatles began to hold hands and have hard day’s nights.
But notice the holding. It’s founded on a right to privacy. No such right is enumerated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Obviously, that means it cannot possibly exist, because the Founders were thorough in enumerating all possible rights a right-thinking person can have and we can never add to that list, right? Well, if you have a certain cast of mind, thinking that a right can be presumed to exist based on the emanations and penumbras of the existing amendments is dangerous talk. Never mind that the concept of a legal penumbra dates to the Nineteenth Century (McCulloch v. Maryland), it first gained prominence in 1965, due to this ruling.
In fact, Justice Black did indeed argue that a right to privacy is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. He is, trivially, correct, but it rather strains credibility to imagine that people don’t have such a right as a consequence. Where, then, is Natural Law, a founding principle of the country and our legal system? Where is the idea of an inalienable right, which is not granted by a government but merely respected by it? Nevertheless, Black’s reasoning still resonates: Some still believe that a right must be mentioned by name in the Constitution as it currently stands to exist, and that recognizing rights not mentioned by name (“inventing” rights, by their lights) is dangerous and innovative.
Gee, doya think that philosophical debate is still live?
Let’s move on to the later rulings that Griswold inspired. First, Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended the idea to unmarried couples (but not, in that pre-Lawrence era, necessarily homosexual couples) because it was deemed a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to deny that right to unmarried couples when married couples enjoyed it. Again, 1972 seems really late for this ruling, but that’s how these things go: Laws stay on the books decades, if not centuries, moldering like WWII ordinance until they go off in some poor sap’s face due to a prosecutor getting too cute with an annoy-the-liberals routine.
Next, a little ditty called Roe vs. Wade (1973) used Griswold and Eisenstadt to strike down a Texas law which made it a crime to help a woman get an abortion.
Now, over forty years later, you can go into Texas and look east, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the char-marks—that place where a whole generation of religious righties went nuclear and flooded into the GOP.
Abortion wasn’t the only issue, school prayer and the Equal Rights Amendment were big as well, but look at what this trifecta of rulings (Griswold, Eisenstadt, and Roe vs. Wade) accomplished: All of a sudden, you could fuck without consequence! Not quite, there were some diseases you couldn’t clear up with antibiotics even then, but it was closer than it had ever been. With the fear of pregnancy being allayed by contraception and abortion and the fear of infection being allayed by modern medicine, what was left? The fear of God? To the extent that worked (insert laughter here) it was being eaten away by more people going to college, thanks to the GI Bill and feminism.
No. Griswold opened the floodgates. Sex was no longer going to ruin your life. If your religion is heavy into purity laws with an ascetic bent, that’s damned near Apocalyptic.
So they elected one of their own. Someone who was deeply religious and deeply Southern. Someone who would bring us out of a national funk and into a new dawn: Jimmy Carter. And when he crapped out, they held their noses and put the divorced actor from California who signed no-fault divorce into law, Ronald Reagan, into office.
And so it goes. And so it continues to go, until today, when the GOP is so religiously bent that the DEMONcrats have to pull teeth to convince them to compromise long enough to not shut down the government in a shit-fit.
Oh, one more thing: The third and fourth decisions Griswold enabled were Lawrence vs. Texas (2003), which holds that adults have the right to engage in private intimate conduct (not including rape and prostitution), and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), which has finally legalized same-sex marriage everywhere in the US.
So that’s why it’s so important to get good justices on the Supreme Court.