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Talking Point: The federal government has nationalized sex policy, and reduced ordinary citizens to bringing knives to a gun fight.

Dr. J speaks at the Nashville Republican Women's luncheon During her visit to Nashville for Aquinas College's "Love & Life in the Divine Plan" conference, Dr. J spoke to the Nashville Republican Women about her work with the Ruth Institute, the views of the next generation on marriage, and the consequences of abandoning or redefining the institution of marriage. (Click the POD icon.)

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March 21-22--South Carolina Parents in Education, African American clergy training conference

April 6--Wheaton College near Chicago

April 8--Texas A&M University

April 18--UC Davis

April 19--Stanford University

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[Click the video to watch "Danny and Annie".]

My name is Cory Heimann. I'm a recent graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where I studied Theology and minored in multi-media communication. When in college I started up a small graphic design and video production company. Through creating films, apprenticing producers in the field, and a passion to learn more, the company grew to something that I could do full time when I graduated (www.likableart.com).

I'm not often one to enter competitions, but when a couple of people pointed out this contest, it piqued my interest. Living and creating in this media-saturated world has brought me to see the promises and perils of film. There is no other medium that can so effectively affect the senses and move a person to action. When looking at the needs of the world: poverty, education, etc., they all come back to the root of the family unit and its need and desire to grow stronger. There has never been a time greater than now that this message needs to be spread. We've seen it for ages that we can preach all day to the head, but stories have the ability to touch the heart.

by Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.

In a 1972 decision widely hailed by the political classes, the Supreme Court opined in Eisenstadt v. Baird, “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusions into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”1 Imagining that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was coercing her citizens to have children against their wishes, the Eisenstadt decision struck down a statute that had been amended to comply with the requirements of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). That earlier decision had demanded that states allow the sale of contraceptives to married couples, as the Court held that prohibiting the use of contraceptive devices in marriage would be an unacceptable invasion of marital privacy.2 In Eisenstadt, however, the Court moved to claim that “whatever the rights the individual to access contraceptives may be, the rights must be the same for married and unmarried alike.”3

The Eisenstadt rendering of a “right to privacy” seems to stand for the position that the nation’s laws—like the one in Massachusetts that functioned as a sanction against both sexual relations and procreation outside of marriage—should not impose so-called “middle-class morality” on the lower classes. The government at all levels, it is claimed, must remain absolutely neutral on “matters so fundamentally affecting a person,” including sexual behavior, marriage, and childbearing decisions. By creating an unrestricted right for all citizens to use contraception regardless of marital status, Eisenstadt is usually praised as an advance for individual liberty against the intrusion and meddling of the state.

Yet what one hand of the law appears to give, the other takes away. The same year the Court was demanding that the government be neutral on sexual matters, Congress was authorizing Medicaid to add contraceptives to its covered services to the low-income population. Not as innocent as it appears, this expansion of Medicaid cannot be understood apart from President Richard M. Nixon’s signing of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, or Title X of the Public Health Services Act, described by social historian Allan C. Carlson as “the first federal program openly focused on the promotion of birth control with the aim of sharply reducing American fertility.”4 In a very real sense, the new coverage made Medicaid, an entitlement program, subservient to the goals of Title X. Within time, Medicaid would become the largest federal supplier of contraception. In 2006, for example, Medicaid was responsible for more than 70 percent of public birth-control expenditures, or $1.3 billion.5

The goals, methods, and results of these two federal birth-control initiatives, however, fly directly in the face of the Supreme Court’s demand that the government remain neutral with respect to private reproductive decisions. There is a fundamental incoherence in federal policy, which limits the rights of the states to regulate or even influence norms of sexual behavior while at the same time assigns to itself the right to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to influence those norms at the state, local, and individual level. The fact that the American public has grown accustomed to the idea of the federal government financing and promoting contraception does not eliminate the fact that Title X and its Medicaid version directly contradict the intellectual underpinnings of the “right to privacy,” which the Court has found to be “fundamental.”

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