War On Women Steps Up

 By our own Helen M Bascom 
(posted with her permission)

Feel free to comment.

The Christian Right in America is stepping up its war on women’s reproductive and privacy rights. A proposed constitutional amendment is being pushed forward in Mississippi that would make all contraception illegal. According to PoliticusUSA the ballot measure has a good chance of passing in the state of Mississippi.

The danger to women cannot be overstated because besides eliminating all forms of contraception, it sets a dangerous precedent for Christians to dictate their belief that women must subject themselves to a man’s will. Michele Bachmann has traveled the country telling audiences that she obeys her husband’s every command because it is what god has instructed in the bible. The male-dominated society yearns for the time when women were barefoot, pregnant, and serving their husbands by keeping quiet and blindly obeying his edicts. Under a constitutional amendment that bans contraception, women will have little choice but to abstain from sexual intercourse or face a life of perpetual pregnancy. However, under the bible’s rules, a woman cannot refuse her husband’s sexual advances so they are left with no choice but to remain pregnant; because it is a biblical edict.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. If you think that something like this can never happen in America, think again. Contraception could be criminalized at the state level in the United States until 1965 when the Court decided the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). In Griswold, the Court held that the right to privacy protected the right of a married couple to use contraception. The US Supreme Court held in Griswold v. Connecticut that states may not criminalize or prohibit the use of contraception. They may succeed at the state level, but the Supreme Court would probably invalidate the state law on the same grounds they used to invalidate the law in Connecticut. The Court is not likely to toss aside the Griswold precedent because to do so would open up a massive can of worms and threaten the validity of decades of established precedent regarding the right to privacy.
I have confidence in our Supreme Court to overturn invasive religious laws such as the one discussed above, however this situation is indicative of a much larger problem in American society. The problem is the ever increasing influence of religion in the secular affairs of government and invasion into the privacy of persons who are not religious. It is their First Amendment right to believe as they wish and to impose religious restrictions on each other within the realm of their religion and practices, but when they bring it to the secular realm and attempt to impose their antiquated, religious views on those who do not share their beliefs and on ME, then their actions cease to be protected by the First Amendment and become MY business.