PIERRE TRUDEAU
(Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau)
Both the United States and Canada had laws regulating the sexual behavior of citizens in the privacy of their own homes. It was not just homosexuality that the state attempted to control. Even the specific positions and methods of heterosexual intercourse were controlled by some states. Oral sex, certain positions of intercourse and other “details” could put a person in jail. Canada, a parliamentary nation, changed this by legislation. In the United States, it was the Supreme Court decisions protecting privacy that invalidated these old sexual role restrictions and prescriptions. For example, just 4 years before this quotation was made, 1963, the state of Connecticut was ordered (Griswald v. Connecticut) to release a pharmacist for the “crime” of filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms for a married couple where the wife would likely die if she became pregnant and carried the baby to term.
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau PC CC CH QC FRSC, also referred to by the initials PET, was a Canadian politician who was the 15th prime minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 1968 to 1984, with a brief period instead as Leader of the Opposition between 1979 and 1980. His tenure of 15 years and 164 days makes him Canada's third longest-serving Prime Minister, behind William Lyon Mackenzie King and John A. Macdonald.
