Griswold Is Not About ‘Contraception.’ It’s About the Right to Privacy. – Esquire

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On February 24, 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis really went to town. He had been engaged by some Boston merchantswhich is to say, in many cases, smugglersto fight against the Writs of Assistance, which were odious general warrants that allowed agents of the Crown to barge into just about any business and/or dwelling to search for smuggled goods. Otis spoke for five hours.

The heart of Otiss lengthy denunciation of the writs came fairly early on in his presentation. To Otis, granting the unlimited ability to search and seize created tyrants out of citizens. He also made it clear that the writs were contrary in spirit to the oldest precepts of English common law.

Listening in the courtroom, a 26-year-old Boston lawyer named John Adams found that Otiss eloquence lit a fire in him. The moment is immortalized in a mural on the wall of the Massachusetts State House. Somewhere in those five hours were the seeds of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as well as the importance of privacy to the life of that entire document. The concept of privacy was the reason they all fought the damn war in the first place.

All that being said, can folks please stop referring to the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut as having been "about contraception"? Griswold confirmed the existence of a right to privacy within the Constitution. That's everything. It's about marriage. It's about sex. It's about what we read. It's about how we communicate with each other. It's about the limits to search and seizure. It's about medical records and genetic information. It's about libraries and the internet. Its about what we learn and how we learn it. Its all tied in together in a fervent prayer to keep us all safe from, as Thomas Jefferson put it, every form of tyranny over the mind of man. As Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg put it in his Griswold concurrence:

So, if Justice Clarence Thomas has his way, and this Supreme Court of dubious legitimacy decides to reconsider Griswold and all its progenyand I make the odds of that no worse than 50-50a lot more than pills and rubbers and diaphragms are on the line. So is the principle that we are entitled to the public expression of our private thoughts, and in that principle, we have the right to be as safe from intrusion as James Otis said those Boston smugglahmerchants were safe against intrusions into their basements by agents of the Crown. Remember, also, as vigilantism among the populace becomes a vital part of law enforcement, that Otis warned us that giving our fellow citizens that power was to make tyrants of them all. Mr. Madison recognized that fundamental truth when he wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1788:

They all knew. That was why they fought the damn war.

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Griswold Is Not About 'Contraception.' It's About the Right to Privacy. - Esquire