High court says “the right to same-sex marriage—should be revisited.”
QUICK FACTS:
- The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, arguing that there is no longer a federal constitutional right to an abortion and setting precedent that could now influence same-sex marriage laws in America.
- In light of Friday’s ruling, the high court said it also now “should reconsider” past rulings that granted same-sex couples the right to marry on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples, like Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
- The U.S. Constitution states one command twice—once in the Fifth Amendment and once in the Fourteenth Amendment: no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” That command is called the ‘Due Process Clause’ and it promises that all levels of American government will operate within the law fairly.
- Roe had protected abortion rights under the Due Process Clause. But Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued on Friday that there is “no abortion guarantee lurking in the Due Process Clause,” thus calling into question past court rulings involving the clause, such as the 2015 Obergefell decision. In future cases, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote, adding that “any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous.'”
- “[W]e have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas added. “After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
DISSENTING LEFT-WING JUSTICES SEE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE NOW “UNDER THREAT”:
- Even the politically left-leaning Justices in opposition to the court’s Friday decision—Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—understood the ruling means that the right to same-sex marriage is “under threat.”
- “And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work,” Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor wrote. “The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.”
- “The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, ‘there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives],’” the progressive justices went on to say. “So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”
BIDEN ALSO SEES SAME-SEX MARRIAGE UNDER THREAT:
READ THE COURT’S FRIDAY DECISION:
BACKGROUND:
- “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” a syllabus of the Supreme Court’s Friday opinion said.
- A draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked in early May to POLITICO in which he said, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he went on to say, adding that it’s “time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
