Professor Henry Holzer of the Brooklyn Law School believes that together the Belle Terre (1974) and Moore (1971) decisions stand for the proposition … - Bob McDonnell

In 1973, the Court in the Roe v. Wade decision gave the individual the right to destroy the unborn through abortion, and three years later in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth it extended the supremacy of individual privacy over parental authority in the child's abortion decision. In his seminal article on the Court's role in shaping a national family policy, scholar Peter J. Riga suggests that in Danforth, "marriage is seen as a tenuous union formed by the consensual agreement of the two individuals who remain autonomous and independent throughout the relationship." He further asserts that by the end of the 1970s, the Court had, for all practical purposes, obliterated the difference between marriage and non-marriage, replacing the sacred covental view of marriage with the "positivistic view that a marriage is but an act of the state, which powers the state may delegate in appropriate cricumstances." In other cases, the abuses of the judicial doctrines of "in loco parentis" and "parens patriae," particularly in such areas as education, discipline of children, and child custody, have fostered subversion of the role of the parent in favor of ultimate decisions on family and children matters by the state and federal governments.

As the family goes, so goes the nation.

The United States Supreme Court dealt among the harshest blows to the American family and traditional morality. A century ago, the Court demonstrated profound respect for the traditional views of marriage and family, stating in Maynard v. Hill that "marriage is the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress." However in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut, the court embarked on [a] dualistic path by attempting to create a view of liberty based on radical individualism, while facilitating statist control of select family issues. The Court postulated a new view of marriage by asserting that "preservation of marital privacy" precludes state interference with the right to use contraceptives, even though the state had long been empowered to regulate the legal and sexual relationships of marriage. In Eisenstadt v. Baird the activist Court illogically extended the Griswold notion of "marital privacy" to unmarried persons, at a time when every state in the union made sexual intercourse between unmarried persons a crime.