Dana Nessel is the attorney general of Michigan, and she faces a tough reelection race this year. Her campaign strategy seems to be disdain for Catholics and dishonest fearmongering about birth control.
“If they win,” Nessel said in a recent dishonest campaign ad, “you might have to cross state lines just to legally have safe sex, and Lansing could decide when and if you have kids.”
This is insane and dishonest, but it’s also a classic Democratic strategy. If a Republican questions any aspect of some Democrats’ contraceptive totalism —that contraception, in all its forms, is a constitutional right that should be subsidized by the government and 100% covered by all employers with no conscience objections allowed and that teenage girls should be immediately put on birth control without parent knowledge, etc. — Democrats accuse that Republican of wanting to ban birth control.
You see, President Barack Obama had some success dishonestly running on birth control mandates in 2012, and some of his colleagues have tried to follow suit. It hasn’t always worked, because running for U.S. Senate or state attorney general on a platform of birth control strikes normal people as kind of weird.
Former Sen. Mark Udall is the only Democratic nominee to lose a top-tier election in Colorado since 2004. His 2014 election campaign was based on lying about birth control. He falsely accused his Republican opponent, then-Rep. Cory Gardner, of trying “to outlaw birth control.”
What Gardner was trying to do was make it legal for employers to decide whether or not they would pay their employees in cash rather than contraception coverage. But Udall just wouldn’t stop talking about birth control.
Udall’s campaign website mentioned “contraception” on 38 different pages, as I wrote at the time. “That’s more mentions than the ‘environment,’ ‘immigration,’ ‘climate’ or ‘insurance.’ ‘Contraception’ shows up on more pages than ‘deficit’ and ‘unemployment’ combined.”
Most of Udall’s ads were on birth control. He ended up losing badly.
Yet Nessel is trying the same tack. Her very first ad is the one lying about making “safe sex illegal.” She ran the ad following a Republican debate in which multiple attorney general hopefuls expressed disapproval of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court ruling that discovered a constitutional “right of privacy” in the penumbras of the Constitution.
When asked whether this decision was good, some Republican attorney general candidates — who are lawyers, after all — criticized the reasoning and its leaning on an imagined constitutional right. Nessel’s trick is to pretend that criticizing a bad Supreme Court decision about contraception is the same as wanting to ban contraception.
Nessel’s fifth grade logic in this case is refuted by what the Republicans actually said before Nessel launched her ad: “My problem with Griswold isn’t the result — of course states shouldn’t ban contraceptives — but rather how the Supreme Court got there.”
Also, come on, let’s be realistic. Nobody is going to outlaw contraception in this country. But getting people scared about contraception, fecundity, and religious people appears to be central to her reelection efforts.
Check out this nonsense attack she made on the Pope in January:
Having done a great deal of work with the foster care system, I can tell you nothing is more “selfish” than having kids you don’t want just bc the Pope thinks you should. Your children will know they weren’t wanted, and it leads to terrible outcomes for both the kids & parents. https://t.co/YhM4j0Kevr
— Dana Nessel (@dananessel) January 6, 2022
As I wrote back then, “That snarky formulation from Nessel, that Catholics mindlessly do what they don’t even want to do ‘because the Pope thinks you should,’ is neither accurate nor original. It is deeply grounded in a long tradition of anti-Catholic bigotry.”
I don’t imagine there’s a large bloc of anti-Catholic, bad-at-logic, single-issue contraception voters in Michigan, but maybe Nessel knows something we don’t.
