Laws upholding various social mores via normative power of the law have been struck down for decades now based on a “right to privacy.” There is an expectation of privacy, as the requirement for warrants demonstrates. But there is a difference between a general right to not have the government snoop on you, and a right to engage in some activity under the guise of privacy.
This however, began to change with the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision. They deemed that restricting a married couple’s access to contraceptives interfered with their marital privacy. While married couples are usually given a legal right to be free of government interference, not dissimilar to that people have with their lawyers or a penitent with a priest, that right is not about protecting certain actions from the scope of government.
Whether activities ought to be within the scope of the law is an entirely different question. That the two have been conflated is the beginning of how a “right to privacy” is being used to justify government endorsement and support, as well as the legal compulsion of 3rd parties to also subsidize and support, the voluntary actions of others.
No greater example of this can be seen than the “right to privacy” between a person and a doctor being re-defined such that both the government and private 3rd parties are required to be involved. Take for example, the question of abortion. Even if one accepts for the sake of argument that a child is not a child until ex utero, the “right to privacy” only extends to between the patient and the doctor (or perhaps also those that voluntarily included, such as with a spouse of parent). Yet this “right to privacy” now includes a “right” to force others to violate their own moral conscious by requiring those other people to pay for said “private choice.”
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