In Griswold, the Supreme Court rejected a Connecticut state law that banned the use of birth control by married couples. (Yes, really.) The court reasoned that “specific guarantees in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights have penumbras … where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion.” There is the First Amendment’s rights to express your religious and political beliefs and to freely associate with others; the Third Amendment’s right to privacy in one’s own home by refusing to house soldiers during peacetime; the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government; the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination; and the Ninth Amendment’s preservation of other individual rights, regardless of whether they are mentioned in the Constitution.
Taken together, the Supreme Court concluded, the protections in the Bill of Rights meant the Founders believed there is a “right to be let alone.”
Conservative legal heroes such as Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas hate this. Each has explicitly argued that the right to privacy is not a constitutional right because the Founders did not did not explicitly say there’s one. In 2007, Justice Thomas wrote that there is “no general right to privacy” or relevant liberty in the U.S. Constitution. Justice Scalia, in the same
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/02-102 case, spoke disparagingly of the “so-called ‘right to privacy.’”
I have been reading many of you gals parroting Scalia and Thomas on this issue for more than 20 years. Today you celebrate a judge’s ruling based upon the same rights you would claim don’t exist in other contexts. Hypocrisy? Absolutely. Yours.