Pierre Trudeau Quotes
Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.
While this was a strong central political principle for Reagan, a substantial part of his political party strongly advocated the against the government interjecting itself into people’s lives.
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.
This quotation is very important because it illustrates a big difference between English Conservatives and American conservative (Republicans). In America, the Conservatives were committed to having the government regulate and control the private morality of citizens—particularly in matters of sex. English conservatives, like the Prime Minister, saw this as an improper intrusion of big government.
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.
