Jeffrey Fleishman | Los Angeles Times (TNS) DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Bill Baird has been called many things: butcher, murderer, pied piper of sex, unholy deviant. It’s hard to imagine the 92-year-old man on the white couch once evoked so much wrath.
But it was a dangerous time when Baird — who was shot at and punched, who lost his family and was jailed — won a 1972 Supreme Court decision that legalized contraception for unmarried women, earning him the nickname the “father” of birth control. The privacy issues raised in Eisenstadt v. Baird were cited less than a year later when the court voted to protect a woman’s right to abortion in Roe v.
Wade. Baird was elated but prescient about what was to come. He knew the persuasions of preachers and the power of the Bible to provoke America’s morality police.
He warned a complacent abortion rights movement that the victory was in danger from a well-organized Christian right that would galvanize the Republican Party. In 1980, he appeared like a party-crashing, secular prophet at a Dallas religious convention where televangelist Jerry Falwell and other right-wing pastors were mobilizing Christian voters and calling for Supreme Court justices to oppose abortion: “This is the first time in the history of this great nation of ours,” Baird said at the time, “that any single group has tried to seize control of the U.S.
Supreme Court to force a particular religious viewpoint.” And he says it’s happening again. “No one li.