Jill Filipovic: The idea of domestic & sexual privacy as an exclusively male privilege

[Nevilledog]

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Jill Filipovic
@JillFilipovic
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Yes it's very ironic that everyone is crowing about Brett Kavanaugh's right to privacy right after he stripped women of ours. But it's not new. The idea of domestic & sexual privacy as an exclusively male privilege has a long history in US law + culture.

jill.substack.com
Brett Kavanaugh's Right to Privacy
The legal right to privacy is very old. It's just that privacy used to be an exclusively male privilege.
2:13 PM · Jul 8, 2022

https://jill.substack.com/p/brett-kavanaughs-right-to-privacy

All of a sudden, privacy rights matter to the same conservatives who just stripped women of ours — because powerful men are seeing their privacy violated.

Of those those men is Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who signed on to the majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade and strip abortion rights from American women. Kavanaugh is apparently having a bad month. Protesters have gathered at his home. They shouted outside a steakhouse he was dining at — and ok, he didn’t see or hear them, but he didn’t stay for dessert. “Politics, regardless of your side or views, should not trample the freedom at play of the right to congregate and eat dinner,” the restaurant chain, Morton’s Steakhouse, said in a statement. “There is a time and place for everything. Disturbing the dinner of all of our customers was an act of selfishness and void of decency.”

“"So these Justices, because protesters do not agree with an opinion... have no right to privacy?" asked right-wing commentator Steve Doocy.

“Even conservative justices have a right to privacy,” writes Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post.

This is, of course, extremely ironic: Roe v. Wade was decided on the basis of a constitutional right to privacy, which Kavanaugh and his fellow conservative justices just called into question when they overturned it. But here’s the thing: Roe didn’t invent the legal concept of a right to privacy; neither did Griswold v. Connecticut, the first case that we associate with the constitutional right to privacy that eventually brought us the rights to contraception, abortion, consensual sex without criminalization, and same-sex marriage. The idea that there is a sphere of privacy around the home and one’s familial, sexual, and domestic life is one long enshrined in American culture and jurisprudence — it’s just that the privacy right was held by men.

Which is also why we’re seeing people, with a straight face, promote radical governmental interference all the way up into the extremely private space of women’s uteruses now wring their hands about Brett Kavanaugh’s privacy being violated because he couldn’t order the crème brûlée: The right to privacy is a privilege long reserved for men.

The US is now just one of just four countries worldwide that has restricted, rather than expanded, abortion rights in the past 25 years, and American conservatives are clear that they have no plans to stop there. The language of the opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health, the case that overruled Roe, goes much farther than just abortion rights, and hints at what’s to come: a possible end to the broad legal rights to contraception, sexual privacy, consensual sex between adults, and even same-sex marriage.

*snip*

[MagickMuffin]

1. I remember not too long ago that Texas had sodomy laws

So, progress walks back into darkness, only now the pace is becoming a mad dash!

[inthewind21]

3. Lawrence V Texas

2003 Look for that to be overturned as well.

[Phoenix61]

2. Not all men. Just the straight ones. nt