Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, thinks the war on women doesn’t go far enough. He wants to extend it to men. In his latest rant, he didn’t call women “sluts” for wanting to have sex outside of marriage, but he did say that all single people should be punished and shamed for succumbing to their desires.

At issue was the 41-year-old Supreme Court ruling, Eisenstadt v. Baird, which gave unmarried people the right to purchase contraceptives and to have intercourse. Of course, young people have been hooking up since long before 1972, but the availability of contraception has meant fewer unplanned pregnancies which has led to fewer abortions and fewer of what Perkins would probably call, “bastard children.”

Perkins apparently gets his birth control ideas straight from the Taliban. He wasn’t clear about what sort of punishment should be issued (stoning, jail, burning at the stake?) but he was clear about one thing. Having premarital sex is wrong and someone needs to pay or society will be forever doomed. [From the audio transcript:]

“The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Well…everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse.

Well, societies have always (unintelligible) that. There were laws against it, now, sure, single people are inclined to push the fences and jump over them, particularly if they’re in love with each other and going on to marriage, but they always knew they were doing wrong. In this case, the Supreme Court said take those fences away, they could do whatever they like and they didn’t address at all what status children had, what status the commons had (by commons, I mean the rest of the United States). Have they got any standing in this case? They just said, “no, singles have the right to contraceptives” which means singles have the right to have sex outside of marriage. Brushing aside millennia – thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, culture – and setting in motion what we have. It’s not the contraception that’s what everybody thinks this is about contraception. What this court case said was, “young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage.” Society never gave young people that right. Functioning societies don’t do that. They stop it. They punish it. They corral people. They shame them. They do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.”

Here’s the audio from Mediaite:

Why, you may ask, should we care what an insignificant man like Tony Perkins says about birth control? We care because the Family Research Council specializes in opening doors. Today, Perkins’ views are extreme. Tomorrow, a GOP Congressman will utter similar words, over which the media will be aghast. Then the American Legislative and Exchange Council will sponsor some bills in states, but because they’re in legalese, they won’t seem quite as bad. Then Paul Ryan or another Catholic member will introduce bills in Congress and then the Supreme Court will get a chance to rule again. We already know how Justice Scalia feels about birth control. He believes that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution and that beyond even Eisenstadt v. Baird, which gave single people the right to birth control, Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 ruling which gave married people the right to birth control, was a mistake.