Thursday, May 08, 2008

No Right to Privacy, Including Birth Control

I am at a loss at times as to why Virginia seems to be the home base for so many wingnut Christianist and allied far right organizations. In addition to Pat Robertson's CBN and Regent University and the late Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University, parts of Northern Virginia - which in general is trending liberal politically - seem to be a cluster fu*k in terms of wingnut organizations ranging from Mike Farris's very scary Patrick Henry College with a mission of preparing "Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding" to the American Life League or "ALL" based in Stafford, Virginia. ALL opposes among other things all forms of abortion, birth control, and embryonic stem cell research. A further example of ALL's lunacy is the fact that ALL charged that Disney had concealed subliminal sexual messages in a number of its animated films, including The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin.
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Now, ALL is sponsoring an anti-birth control event on June 7, 2008, called "The Pill Kills." Worse yet, ALL is again bemoaning the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut which struck down laws barring MARRIED couples from using birth control. While ALL is a Catholic based organization, it shares the same agenda as fundamentalist Christianist organizations: having all U.S. Supreme Court decisions based on "the right to privacy" theory struck down. This would include Griswold, Roe v. Wade, Larence v. Texas and many other decisions - decisions that Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomsa would overturn if a conservative majority is achieved on the Supreme Court. These wingnuts do NOT want individuals to chart their own sexuality and lives. Sadly, the MSM never portrays the full extent of this extremist agenda or the potential consequences of a McCain presidency with conservative judicial appointments to the U. S. Supreme Court. Here is what ALL is saying about birth control:
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June 7 marks the 43rd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut. This was the first of many decisions that led to the culture of death we live in today.
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On that day in 1965, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Griswold v. Connecticut case, it set a legal precedent for claiming that the Constitution grants women the right to privacy in matters of sexual practice. This meant that Connecticut and the rest of the United States could not stop a married woman from obtaining birth control pills. However, as Judge Andrew Napolitano has pointed out, the constitutional right to privacy has nothing to do with birth control.
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Everyone should know the deadly consequences of the pill and similar contraceptive products- they cause chemical abortions. . . . Protest the Pill Day '08: The Pill Kills Babies, scheduled for the Griswold anniversary of Saturday, June 7. We encourage you to gather with your friends for peaceful protests in front of facilities that distribute birth control products. American Life League computed the following estimates for chemical abortions alone, from 1973 to 2003:
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**During this period, approximately 6,605,000 to 11,725,000 chemical abortions occured in the United States annually.
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**During this period, a total of 196,325,000 to 324,325,000 chemical abortions wiped out the equivalent of the entire United States population!

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