Privacy Rights Quotes
This quotation is particularly interesting when compared with {633126} that he said in his First Inaugural Address. His idealism was tempered some by his first 4 years in the Presidency.
Both the United States and Canada had laws regulating the sexual behavior of citizens in the privacy of their own homes. It was not just homosexuality that the state attempted to control. Even the specific positions and methods of heterosexual intercourse were controlled by some states. Oral sex, certain positions of intercourse and other “details” could put a person in jail. Canada, a parliamentary nation, changed this by legislation. In the United States, it was the Supreme Court decisions protecting privacy that invalidated these old sexual role restrictions and prescriptions. For example, just 4 years before this quotation was made, 1963, the state of Connecticut was ordered (Griswald v. Connecticut) to release a pharmacist for the “crime” of filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms for a married couple where the wife would likely die if she became pregnant and carried the baby to term.
He refused to answer questions about an alleged affair he was carrying on, and his estrangement from his partner. (He was not married to the “First Lady”. France is much more sophisticated about the sex lives of politicians than is the United States. In addition, French politicians get much more of a zone of privacy from the press—much like that of the United States in the middle of the 20th century.
Many politicians were arguing that giving the intelligence agencies more power to wiretap, bug and hack into personal communications despite the 4th Amendment’s strictures argued that the public was in rational fear of terror attacks and had a right to be protected.
