Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum comes under attack for what Democras call his support for a Republican Party assault on women's health. Santorum's views on birth control are nothing new, however. An avid supporter of states rights, Santorum argued that state's had a right to ban birth control in a 2005 interview with Newsweek, based on the federalist system.
There is no constitutionally based right to privacy, he says, arguing that it is a phony legal concoction foisted on the country by liberal judges. As it happens, the 1965 case which declared the existence of privacy rights legitimized contraception. He calls that case, and others that followed it, a "massive usurpation of power by the judiciary." "Would I ban contraception in the states as a state legislator? No way. Would I do it as a federal official? No way." Even so, he said, each state should be free to legislate the matter on its own. If that means the banning of contraception (or, presumably, adultery or premarital sex), then so be it. "It should be the same with sodomy laws," he said. "Texas should have had the right. People should have had the right."