Gov. Brian Kemp speaks during an election-night watch party Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) admitted last month that he is not aware of the landmark Supreme Court birth control case Griswold v. Connecticut, even as he supports legislation that could ban birth control.

An audio clip of Kemp at a reelection campaign event supposedly shows the governor saying he does not know about the case when asked about it by an unnamed person recording.

“No idea about that,” Kemp tells the person recording. “I would have to look at that. Want an email or something?”

 

Griswold vs. Connecticut is a June 7, 1965 decision in which seven of nine justices ruled to strike down a long-standing Connecticut law and legalized contraception use for married couples. Along with being a landmark case in privacy rights, future major Court decisions used the Griswold decision as precedent, including 1973’s Roe v. Wade (which legalized abortion) and 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized gay marriage).

Kemp, a staunch anti-abortion advocate, vowed as a gubernatorial candidate in 2018 that he would “sign the toughest abortion laws in the country” and define “life” as starting at conception. As birth control prevents conception, this will likely create a case for banning birth control in the state of Georgia. Lawmakers in states like Louisiana are already creating legislation that would ban birth control under those pretenses.

The 1965 decision made a brief but notable appearance in Justice Amy Comey Barrett’s 2020 Supreme Court nomination hearings, where Barrett broke from predecessors and declined to say if the case was fairly decided. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) attempted to shut down conversation about the case in those hearings by wildly claiming that making it a topic was anti-Catholic bias.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) also denounced the Griswold v. Connecticut decision in a video published during Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings in March.

The audio, provided to Heartland Signal by a Democratic source on the condition of anonymity, comes from a bus tour stop in Monroe as he was campaigning during the Republican gubernatorial primary. Kemp handily defeated the Trump-backed David Perdue by over 50 percentage points in last month’s primary election; he will face Democrat Stacey Abrams in a rematch of the 2018 election.

Kemp’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment by press time.