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Opinion Alito's draft ruling on abortion is a warning to LGBTQ Americans
This is a great piece by Jonathon Capehart
Link to tweet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/05/alito-opinion-lgbtq-rights/
Until Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was published Monday, I didn’t fully understand just how dependent my same-sex marriage is on a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Now I do. And I’m terrified.
The tremors of this political earthquake reached me the next day in Los Angeles during a conversation with Ian Mackey, an out gay Missouri state representative who went viral last month after an impassioned speech standing up to fellow lawmakers whose noxious legislation targets trans kids. Mackey pointed out that Roe provided the underpinning for pro-LGBTQ rulings including Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Without Roe, the foundation for Obergefell is gone — and the more than 568,000 same-sex marriages performed since then, including my own, could be invalidated.....
The first of myriad red flags appears on Page 5. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito writes. “That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’” This country has a lot of rights not deeply rooted. For instance, the nation is 245 years old, but racial integration is just 57 years old. Marriage equality is nearly seven.....
After more than 60 pages of questioning the definition of privacy, exploring rationales for overturning precedent and deriding Roe as an exercise in judicial policymaking, Alito makes an astonishing assertion: “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
Alito must think we’re fools. I’m as reassured by that as I was when the pharmacist said to this trypanophobe, “You won’t feel a thing,” before jabbing me with my second covid-19 booster. If Roe and Casey must be overturned because they are hopelessly flawed, then all other cases that rely on their arguments asserting privacy and personal liberty are endangered. The 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court majority is packed with ideologues; how could it resist taking Alito’s radical thinking to its logical end?
The tremors of this political earthquake reached me the next day in Los Angeles during a conversation with Ian Mackey, an out gay Missouri state representative who went viral last month after an impassioned speech standing up to fellow lawmakers whose noxious legislation targets trans kids. Mackey pointed out that Roe provided the underpinning for pro-LGBTQ rulings including Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Without Roe, the foundation for Obergefell is gone — and the more than 568,000 same-sex marriages performed since then, including my own, could be invalidated.....
The first of myriad red flags appears on Page 5. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Alito writes. “That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.’” This country has a lot of rights not deeply rooted. For instance, the nation is 245 years old, but racial integration is just 57 years old. Marriage equality is nearly seven.....
After more than 60 pages of questioning the definition of privacy, exploring rationales for overturning precedent and deriding Roe as an exercise in judicial policymaking, Alito makes an astonishing assertion: “To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
Alito must think we’re fools. I’m as reassured by that as I was when the pharmacist said to this trypanophobe, “You won’t feel a thing,” before jabbing me with my second covid-19 booster. If Roe and Casey must be overturned because they are hopelessly flawed, then all other cases that rely on their arguments asserting privacy and personal liberty are endangered. The 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court majority is packed with ideologues; how could it resist taking Alito’s radical thinking to its logical end?
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