On almost agreeing with Rick Santorum, revisited

Okay, so it appears, on closer examination, that I don't agree with Rick Santorum after all. Not even a little bit. But it's okay, see, because it turns out that he doesn't agree with himself, either:

Did little Ricky just say on Aaron Brown what I thought he said? That Griswold was wrongly decided, and that therefore the state has the right to regulate the use of birth control by married couples?

Aw, man, for serious? This is what I get for turning off CNN when CSI comes on. Did anyone actually get to see it? What did Aaron have to say?

Wow, Santorum must be all ticked off about this new book that just came out. It talks about how great Griswold was for supporting marriage and establishing a zone of privacy around it:

With respect to sexual conduct, not abortion, the Court had recognized a zone of privacy around marriage. In other words, married people were treated differently under the law with respect to their sexual activity with one another than unmarried people. In its left-handed way, the Court in Griswold gave deference to marriage between one man and one woman as the building block for society and the legitimate purpose for sexual activity and thereby protected it from state regulation.

Rick, you'll want to check that book out, like, right away. I think it's called It Takes a Family. You're going to want to talk with that guy about family values.

Update: Kos has been kind enough to provide a transcript of the conversation in question:

BROWN: Do you think there's a right to privacy in the Constitution? . . . For example, if you'd been a Supreme Court judge in Griswold versus Connecticut, the famous birth control case came up, which centered around whether there was a right to privacy. Do you believe that was correctly decided?

SANTORUM: No, I don't. I write about it in the book. I don't.

. . . BROWN: Why would a conservative argue that government should interfere with that most personal decision?

SANTORUM: I didn't. I said it was a bad law. And... They had the right to make it. Look, legislatures have the right to make mistakes and do really stupid things...but we don't have to create constitutional rights because we have a stupid legislature. And that's the problem here, is the court feels like they have a responsibility to right every wrong. When they do that, unlike a Congress, that if we make a really stupid mistake and we do something wrong, we go back next year or next month and change it, and we've done that. Courts don't do that. They only get cases that come before them and they have to make broad, sweeping decisions that have huge impact down the road.

That's what happened in Griswold. It was a bad law. The court felt, we can't let this bad law stand in place. It's wrong. It was. But they made a -- they created out of whole cloth a right that now has gone far, far from Griswold versus Connecticut.

So Griswold is good, good for protecting marriage. But it was bad, bad for raising the issue of privacy. Because only marriages are private. Except for gay marriages. And the Supreme Court was bad for making sweeping decisions that lay judicial precendence for privacy rights, except for the part that protected marriage, which was good.

I hope we're clear on that.

I think I'll use this opportunity to take a look at the Constitution and our right to privacy. Except I smell banana bread in the kitchen, so privacy rights will have to wait until tomorrow.