Suddenly the issue of contraception is front and center in the political discussion.

Starts out with rules requiring catholic hospitals to provide health insurance which covers the costs of contraception for women employees.

Bishops rail. We cannot be forced to provide this coverage which is against our beliefs.

It’s not a church mind you being required to provide contraception in its health insurance plans offered to church employees. It’s a hospital owned by the church.

The issue is framed by the bishops as an attack on religious freedom.

Well ok. Suppose the church owned hospital owned a venture fund? Do employees of the venture fund get health insurance covering contraception? Is religion still being attacked?

Never mind. Let’s move on.

The original rules are compromised. The church owned hospital will not pay for (provide) coverage for contraception to its employees. The insurance company will pay.

Case settled? Not on your life.

Yesterday a Congressional hearing is held on the issue of contraception. No women will speak. No women on the witness list.  Plenty of church folk. The situation is laughable if it wasn’t so demeaning to women.

Later we hear the money bag man for Rick Santorum reminiscing about how women used aspirin for birth control. "Holding the aspirin between their knees". Does this asshat billionaire have a wife? Daughters?

The point I am trying to make in reiterating all of this is that the real issue beneath all the claptrap about insurance coverage and religious freedom is the right to contraception.

Rick Santorum and his bag man would take that right away from women. They would overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark Supreme Court case which struck down Connecticut’s laws against contraception.

Prior to 1965 not even married couples could buy a condom in Connecticut. You had to go to New York. I know. Read my post :

http://open.salon.com/blog/toritto/2012/02/15/id_like_a_box_of_trojans_please

Now why is this important? Contraception was once considered one of those "state’s rights" issues not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.- each state had it’s own rules.  Twice before the Connecticut law had been challenged and twice the Supreme Court had refused to hear the cases on technical grounds.

In probably the most famous dissent in Supreme Court history, Justice John Marshall Harlan II argued that the Supreme Court should have heard the case rather than dismissing it.  Thereafter he indicated his support for a broad interpretation of the due process clause. He famously wrote, "the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints." On the basis of this interpretation of the due process clause, Harlan concluded that the Connecticut statute violated the Constitution.

In Griswold four years later by a vote of 7 - 2 the Supreme Court found the right to privacy which was the justification for striking down the Connecticut law as unconstitutional and essentially making contraception available nationwide.

Unfortunately the Griswold decision only applied to married couples.  Single people still could not get contraception in many states including Connecticut.  It would not be until 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird that a Massachusetts law was found unconstitutional since it denied unmarried couples the same right to privacy previously granted to married couples.

It is the Right to Privacy, as articulated in Griswold which is the basis of Roe v. Wade. Without Griswold there might not be a Roe v. Wade. And if Griswold were to be struck down on the basis that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution then the way to strike down Roe v. Wade is open..

The issue of contraception must be defended in order to defend the right to abortion. That is what our Bishops really want.  That is the fish they are after.

My suggestion to women might be to adopt the tactics of Lysistrata. Tell your man your legs are closed until he agrees to support and vote women’s issues. Aristophanes can’t be wrong.

And if you are a woman and you vote for these crackpots you deserve to be back in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant - which is exactly where you will be if these nutjobs come to power.

 You are seeing the power of churches.  No one is forcing believers to practice coontraception (although the vast majority of catholic women do) or to pay to provide the service to others.  They however, through a radical political / social agenda will try to make their beliefs the law of the land.

Remember when you vote.