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After overturning Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas declared that he had legislation protecting homosexual marriage and contraception in his sights.
Thomas urged his colleagues’ judges to reverse earlier decisions that followed the same legal precedent after Friday’s major judgment.
The proposed legal modifications, announced in a concurring opinion of the judgment written by Thomas, would place restrictions on homosexual marriage, same-sex sexual conduct, and women’s access to contraception.
It happens at a time when the Supreme Court controversially decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, a nearly 50-year-old ruling that gave women the right to an abortion under the Constitution.
The 74-year-old judge, George H.W. Bush appointment, continued by saying the court should reevaluate other instances that fell under prior due process rulings.
Thomas firmly believed that the court should apply the same reasoning to other significant cases because it was determined on Friday that the Due Process Clause of the Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion.
He cited three in particular – including 1965’s Griswold v. Connecticut, which allowed married couples to buy and use contraception, and 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, which allowed same-sex couples to legally marry.
Thomas firmly believed that the court should apply the same reasoning to other significant cases because the Due Process Clause of the Constitution was determined to not provide a right to an abortion in Friday’s decision.
All of these concern Americans’ fundamental rights to privacy, due process, and equal protection; these principles also played a major role in Friday’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling.
Because of this, Thomas, 74, stated, “in future cases, we should review every substantive due process precedent set down by this Court, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
The well-known conservative justice continued by saying that “we have a duty to ‘correct the wrong’ established in previous cases.”
The assertion from Thomas comes as members of the left had warned that such a ruling could lead to the reversal of other landmark cases, following Politco’s leak of an initial draft of the court’s decision in May.
‘If the premise of the ruling as released were to be maintained, a whole spectrum of rights are in issue,’ President Joe Biden said of the draft opinion in May, referring to Friday’s 5-4 vote to overturn the 1973 decision. a wide variety of rights.
‘The idea [that] we’re letting the states make those decisions, localities make those decisions, would be a fundamental shift in what we’ve done,’ the president added.
On Friday, Biden also pointed out that three justices appointed by previous Trump -Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were central to the overturning of Roe.
‘It was three justices named by one president – Donald Trump – who were at the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,’ Biden said.
Retiring liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who penned the dissent signed by Justices Elana Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, also predicted that the demise of Roe could have broader implications.
‘And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work,’ Breyer wrote, after laying out how the decision suggests that a ‘woman has not rights to speak of.’
‘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,’ Breyer noted.
Breyer, like Thomas, points to Griswold v. Connecticut – which permitted married couples to use contraception without government interference – and then to Obergefell, the landmark same-sex marriage decision.
‘They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision-making over the most personal of life decisions,’ Breyer said.
The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said the decision only pertained to abortion arguing that it was not ‘deeply rooted in history.’
Breyer argued that’s not possible.
‘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.,’ Breyer wrote. ‘Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.’