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| Photo Credit: AP. |
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Friday called for overturning the precedent which gave Americans constitutional rights to contraceptives and LGBTQ. The comments followed the successful repealing of the Roe v Wade ruling which for five decades gave American women unprecedented access to abortion.
In a
separate opinion, Thomas acknowledged that Friday’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson
Women’s Health Organization does not directly affect any rights besides
abortion, according to The Hill. Thomas also argued that the constitution’s Due
Process Clause does not secure a right to an abortion or any other substantive rights,
and urged the court to apply the same reasoning to other landmark cases.
Thomas
wrote, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive
due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,”
according to The Hill.
Democrats
and liberal activists have warned in the days following the leak of a draft
majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade early this year that the conservative majority
would soon turn its attention to other rights that the court has affirmed.
According to
The Hill, the three cases Thomas mentioned are all landmark decisions
establishing certain constitutional rights.
In 1965 the Supreme
Court ruled in the Griswold v Connecticut case that married couples have right
to access contraceptive, according to The Hill. In 2003, the court ruled in
Lawrence v Texas that states could not outlaw consensual gay sex. After more
than a decade, the court reached a decision in 2015 in Obergefell v Hodges
establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Alito was quick
to dispel any conclusion from his majority opinion to the extent of its underlying
meaning saying it applies only to abortion and rejected any assertions that the
rationale in Dobbs could mostly likely apply to Griswold, Lawrence or Obergefell.
“Nothing in
this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not
concern abortion,” Alito wrote, according to The Hill.
However the
three members of the court’s liberal wing — Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena
Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — rejected that assurance in their dissent, saying
the majority’s willingness to overturn the landmark decades-old decision leaves
other precedents vulnerable, according to The Hill.
“And no one
should be confident that this majority is done with its work,” the three
liberals wrote, according to The Hill. “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 decision making 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 justices added,
according to The Hill.
“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.”