{"id":8005,"date":"2012-11-23T21:01:16","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T21:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=8005"},"modified":"2012-11-23T22:03:07","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T22:03:07","slug":"cruz-i-dont-know-a-single-republican-who-wants-to-take-away-anybodys-contraceptives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/cruz-i-dont-know-a-single-republican-who-wants-to-take-away-anybodys-contraceptives\/","title":{"rendered":"Cruz: &#8220;I don&#8217;t know a single Republican&#8230;who wants to take away anybody&#8217;s contraceptives&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xc9EAMlLxZ0?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Last week at the Federalist Society annual lawyers&#8217; convention, Texas Senator-elect Ted Cruz made the following remarks (beginning at 23:05 on the video):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The President, every Democrat, went throughout this campaign, saying, &#8220;Republicans want to take away contraceptives.&#8221; What utter and complete nonsense. I don&#8217;t know a single Republican on the face of the globe who wants to take away anybody&#8217;s contraceptives. Look, my wife and I have two little girls. I&#8217;m thrilled we don&#8217;t have seventeen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This got a deserved laugh from the audience. But can it really be the case that Sen.-elect Cruz doesn&#8217;t &#8220;know a single Republican on the face of the globe who wants to take away anybody&#8217;s contraceptives&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps the editors of National Review could introduce him to some. Less than two weeks ago NR published an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/articles\/333524\/judicial-usurpation-then-and-now-robert-p-george-and-david-l-tubbs\">article<\/a> by Robert P. George, probably the most ubiquitous Catholic intellectual on the Right these days, and David L. Tubbs, denouncing on its 40th anniversary <em>Eisenstadt<\/em> v. <em>Baird<\/em>, the decision by which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as a violation of the right to personal privacy a Massachusetts law against the sale of contraceptives to unmarried persons. With unmistakable distaste, George and Tubbs blast the Court for embracing &#8220;a right of unmarried persons to have their lifestyle choices facilitated by the legal availability of contraceptives.&#8221; They complain that until <em>Eisenstadt<\/em>, such laws had been in force &#8220;since the 1870s as a straightforward exercise of the &#8216;police power&#8217; \u2014 a state legislature\u2019s broad constitutional authority to promote public health, safety, and morals.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Now, it would be possible &#8212; it happens regularly in arguments about constitutional law &#8212; to criticize the logic and derivation of a decision like <em>Eisenstadt<\/em> without actually defending the wisdom of the law being struck down. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, dissenting from the <em>Lawrence<\/em> v. <em>Texas<\/em> decision, famously described laws against consensual private sodomy as &#8220;uncommonly silly&#8221; even while agreeing with Justice Antonin Scalia that the U.S. Constitution does not bar such laws. <\/p>\n<p>But that doesn&#8217;t appear to be George-and-Tubbs&#8217;s game at all. Far from including any &#8220;to be sure, we don&#8217;t favor such a law as policy&#8221; disclaimers, they praise laws like the one struck down as ways for legislators &#8220;to discourage people from engaging in sexual relations outside the matrimonial bond&#8221; and &#8220;reinforce cultural norms about the undesirability of having sex and children outside of marriage.&#8221; Robert George, who teaches at Princeton and is visiting at Harvard Law this year, has written an entire book <a href=\"http:\/\/www.libertarianism.org\/publications\/books\/making-men-moral-civil-liberties-public-morality\">revealingly<\/a> <a href=\"www.ubirataniorio.org\/antigo\/moral.pdf\">titled<\/a> Making Men Moral, praising and defending &#8220;morals laws&#8221; applying criminal sanctions to what was once called victimless crime, such as consensual private homosexual activity and the sale of contraceptives.<\/p>\n<p>We know that the two must be acquainted, since <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/02\/us\/politics\/republican-senate-candidate-in-texas-is-known-as-an-intellectual-force.html?_r=0\">in a NYT profile<\/a> Prof. Robert George is described as &#8220;Mr. Cruz\u2019s adviser at Princeton in the early 1990s.&#8221; Perhaps we should read the relevant sentence in a slightly amended way, to say that the Senator-elect doesn&#8217;t know a single <em>elected<\/em> Republican on the face of the globe who favors (or at least publicly favors) taking away anyone&#8217;s contraceptives. Prof. Robert George can afford to promote misplaced nostalgia about 1950s morals legislation, but GOP candidates who hope to be elected these days cannot. [<strong>Corrected<\/strong> to remove a sentence that left a misleading implication about Cruz&#8217;s own religious affiliation, which is Southern Baptist.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week at the Federalist Society annual lawyers&#8217; convention, Texas Senator-elect Ted Cruz made the following remarks (beginning at 23:05 on the video): The President, every Democrat, went throughout this campaign, saying, &#8220;Republicans want to take away contraceptives.&#8221; What utter &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/cruz-i-dont-know-a-single-republican-who-wants-to-take-away-anybodys-contraceptives\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8005"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8016,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005\/revisions\/8016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}