“In a battle between you and the world, bet on the world (every time).”                                                     —Franz Kafka.

ROLLING FORK—OK, let’s take this real slow, right from the top, so as perhaps not to confuse the congenitally slow, the “special” people who more and more have stumbled their way into politics in recent years. Should you, for any reason, feel inclined to take a position against birth control, don’t.

I genuinely cannot believe that in 2012 America, we are actually trying to start some debate about contraceptives and birth control, but for the breathtakingly dim-witted who are in the process of doing so, I have a keen bit of white-hot advice: That horse is out of the barn; that ship has sailed; that train has left the station. Comprende?

This notion, which has been so long decided as to not even really qualify as an issue any more, is a loser. Embrace this cause, pick up this torch and it will beat you like a rented mule.

And there is one painfully obvious, excruciatingly good reason for that—women.

From the day, from the minute back in the 1960s when they started mass marketing the pill, this baby was OVER. And if you think you are going to even dilute, much less do away with that  right of choice for women, you deserve the beating you are about to get because you are simply too stupid to be in politics.

Now, let me make this very clear. Nothing I have said to this point or will say later is in any way meant to demean any teaching or position held within the Catholic Church. Both the hierarchy and the congregations of the Catholic Church are absolutely free to believe and practice any doctrine they might choose to whatever degree they might choose.

I am addressing the political, not the theological, being as I am of a mind that the two don’t tend to mix necessarily very well.

So, here’s the reality and politics of this—again, without trying to use too many of what my friend Billy Johnson somewhat colorfully calls “chicken-s–t” words, so as not to befuddle the hopelessly dense.
To keep ourselves on firm legal footing, we have to go  back to  the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in a case styled Griswold v. Connecticut, in which by a 7-2 margin, the justices struck down a law in that state banning the use of contraceptives. Though not as well known as many, that case is considered to be a landmark one, in that it marked the first in which the Supreme Court ruled that while not specifically referenced within the Bill of Rights, the Constitution protected an implied right of privacy. While one justice wrote that right was to be found within the “penumbras and emanations” (sorry, Billy, his words, not mine) of other protections, the majority found it to lie within the “substantive” Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.

(That then established right of privacy was to become a most important and to this day controversial one eight years later in another case styled Roe v. Wade.)

So here’s the deal: The majority of all human beings in this country are women. The majority of all voters in this country are women. It is estimated that approximately 98 percent of all those women utilize some form of birth control at some point during their lives and a whole lot of them utilize it a whole lot.

Now, in my experience, one of the characteristics shared by most women is an exceedingly long memory, especially when it comes to matters in which they perceive they have been somehow wronged. Elephants might forget; women don’t. I have also noticed that when it comes to this issue, virtually all the politicians trying to make it one are men, a fact I sense to be not inconsequential. So, Mr. Politician, you want to be one of the fellows who is going to try to curb those women’s rights to the contraceptives of their choice?

Well, good luck to you, Buddy, because your political career is about to experience some slow walking and sad singing and you won’t hear a word of it. Hell, from a purely political standpoint, you’d be better off getting caught in bed with an ugly woman or a pretty boy than to get in between a woman and her birth control pills.

Want to know what you should be talking about? It’s the economy, stupid.

(Award winning columnist Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork. Contact him at deercreekpilot@bellsouth.)net).