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For decades American politics has been poisoned by the great abortion debate. Never mind that the economy is in the dumps, the national debt is spiraling out of control, the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, health-care costs are rising (even faster with the onset of Obamacare), and each year our kids learn a little less than they did the year before. So candidates for public office better know where they stand on abortion, because they will be asked again and again. And they better not flip-flop on the issue.

Now, lo and behold, contraception has yet again surfaced as the social policy issue of the day. So, candidates for President of the United States better know where they stand. Making contraception center-most in the campaign for president in 2012 is like making a black-and-white, silent movie in the twenty-first century: Who would guess that it would win the Oscar for best picture? And who would guess that forty-seven years after Griswold v. Connecticut, contraception would make a return to the silver screen of national politics.

Before candidate Rick Santorum resurrected the long moribund topic of the acceptability of contraception, the question du jour was whether the Obama administration’s newly promulgated rule on the provision of contraception services violates religious freedom or supports the freedom of women to control their reproductive lives. Now the question is whether the government has a role in regulating contraception. The response to that question should be: “You’ve got to be kidding! Of course there is no role for government.” But given that the question is now on the front page of every paper in the land, perhaps we can make some lemonade from this lemon.

Almost every American knows that Roe v. Wade (1973) is shorthand for good or evil, depending on where you stand on abortion. But who, save particularly attentive law students, would even recognize Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)? Who, among the general population, or even among members of Congress, knows that Griswold is the case in which the United States Supreme Court invalidated a Connecticut ban on contraceptives because it interfered with the constitutional right of marital privacy? Griswold provided the precedent on which Roe was founded, yet even now, when contraception is again in the news, Griswold remains an obscure case known only to the cognoscenti of the Constitution.

Griswold v. Connecticut was in the full spirit of 1776. It stood and still stands for liberty.

But if we must endure a public debate about the government’s role on the issue of birth control, let’s rememberGriswold and the much-maligned (on the right) right of privacy it confirmed. And let’s remember that even a half century ago, the Connecticut statute found to violate that right of privacy was not being enforced and thus stood only as testimony to past restrictions on marital privacy, or perhaps only to past hopes of restrictions on privacy. In 1965, just like today, the reality was that the vast majority of the population relied on contraception to control pregnancy, and few state officials had the stomach for enforcing any laws to the contrary. So why was the law challenged, and why did it make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court?

The challenge to the Connecticut statute, along with the Griswold decision itself, stood as symbols for the ongoing struggle to preserve liberty in the face of government interference. The very suggestion, even in the form of an old and unenforced statute, that the government could intervene in the marital bedroom required, in today’s parlance, a “smackdown.” Such a law was an affront to the most fundamental value of the United States Constitution—liberty.

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