I like to write about the Twins when things are looking up, and they've won their last four games, but they have also won just five of their last thirteen, and the five wins were all against the Chicago White Sox (1) and the Baltimore Orioles (4), teams with a cumulative record of 54-125. Next up: three home games against the Kansas City Royals, whose record stands at 25-64. So if the Twins were to sweep the Royals, they would then have won eight of their last sixteen games, ten of the sixteen having been against three teams with the three worst records in the major leagues. They would have been 8-2 against those teams and 0-6 against the others.
I'm going to wait until their record for the season is above .500. Since they are currently at 39-48, the chance of my ever broaching this topic again is low.
How about instead a little Supreme Court history while we wait for Trump to roll out his choice, reality TV-style, during prime time tonight? The case of Griswold v Connecticut was argued before the court on March 29 and 30, 1965, and decided that summer (while the Twins were on their way to their first pennant). You can listen to the oral argument here, at Oyez, which summarizes the facts and question raised by the case in the following admirably concise manner:
Griswold was the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut. Both she and the Medical Director gave information, instruction, and other medical advice to married couples concerning birth control. Griswold and her colleague were convicted under a Connecticut law which criminalized the provision of counselling, and other medical treatment, to married persons for purposes of preventing conception.
Does the Constitution protect the right of marital privacy against state restrictions on a couple's ability to be counselled in the use of contraceptives?
And the decision of the Supreme Court:
Though the Constitution does not explicitly protect a general right to privacy, the various guarantees within the Bill of Rights create penumbras, or zones, that establish a right to privacy. Together, the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, create a new constitutional right, the right to privacy in marital relations. The Connecticut statute conflicts with the exercise of this right and is therefore null and void.
The decision was 7-2 and the majority opinion written by Justice William O. Douglas (he had made the cover of Time when he was chairman of the SEC, before FDR put him on the Supreme Court). The First Amendment bars any "law respecting an establishment of religion . . . or abridging the freedom of speech." The Third Amendment bars the government, including in times of war, from quartering soldiers on private property without the consent of the owner. The Fourth Amendment states that "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." The Ninth Amendment says, in its entirety, "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Someone unburdened by a legal education might say that people had formed an organization intended to exercise a free speech right to give advice about contraception and that other people wanted to listen and perhaps put the advice into practice. The government has to butt out because, while the authors of the Bill of Rights could not have foreseen the Connecticut statute, it's implausible to think they'd have tolerated it. The government needs "probable cause" and a warrant to search your house but it can prevent you from getting information about contraception from an organization seeking to dispense it? You don't have to quarter soldiers but you must not practice contraception? The aversion of any religious sect to contraception cannot cover the difficulties, and the Supreme Court said No to Connecticut.
I would have thought that the "butt out, government" aspect of the court's decision would appeal to conservatives, but mostly they hate it. It seems that what they're really interested in is not principles but policy results, so their "principles" vary from case to case. If the question is, say, whether the government can prevent corporations from secretly contributing huge sums of money to political candidates, in the reasonable expectation that they will be rewarded with government policies that benefit their industry, then "Government, butt out, we can do with our money what we want." But when the question is whether the government can ban or restrict practices that go against their religious or philosophical beliefs, big government suddenly looks attractive. Regarding Planned Parenthood's challenge to the Connecticut statute, their approach is to search the Constitution for a sentence such as, "No state shall adopt a law prohibiting access to, or information about, contraceptive methods." Finding no such language, they conclude that the Connecticut statute is okay. The limited government principle has been sloughed off and now they are "strict constructionists."
Lurking in the background, of course, is the abortion issue. For the reasoning that underlies Griswold also supplies the scaffolding for the court's decision in Roe v Wade, which was decided eight years after Griswold with Justice Douglas, still on the bench, joining the majority opinion written by Minnesotan Harry Blackmun, who had been put on the court by President Nixon in 1970. When in the context of Roe conservatives deride "constitutional penumbras and emanations," they are using the language of one decision to heap scorn on another. Since contraception isn't the flashpoint that abortion is, it wouldn't help their cause if people felt that if Roe goes down, then logic requires that Griswold does, too. So their conflation of the two is apt in a way that they might want to deny. Along this line, it seems worth mentioning that many widely used contraceptive methods work, not by preventing conception, but by preventing the fertilized egg from implanting in the lining of the uterus. Thus if, as we are told, "human life begins at conception," it follows that access to these contraceptive methods must be barred as surely as access to abortion--indeed, by the logic of most opponents of abortion rights, they are the same thing.
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