elfs | Teaching Sarah Palin, the Supreme Court Meme

Sarah Palin, in a recent interview, was asked what Supreme Court cases she thought were important. She was able to remember Roe v. Wade, and that was it. She couldn't name a single other case. (It was also revealed in the same interview that she could not name a single newspaper, period. Let's see, I look through the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Seattle PI on a daily basis.) We've been encouraging the netroots to teach Sarah Palin about the Supreme Court by naming your favorite case.

Everyone knows what my favorite case is: Griswold v. Connecticut. The court held "Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy."

Griswold is one of those pivot-law cases. It held that although there is no explicit "right to privacy" in the Constitution, several of the amendments are clear indicators that the writers assumed privacy from government intrusion within one's own body and property as a given. The case is almost universally loathed among right-wing commentators because it restrained the government from policing the private conduct of its citizens. Based on Griswold, we got Roe v. Wade, Eisenstat v. Baird which allowed unmarried people to buy contraceptives, and Lawrence v. Texas which legalized homosexual conduct in the privacy of one's own home.