Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is calling for the court to reconsider rulings that protect access to contraception and same-sex marriages as the court overturned abortion rights.
In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said the court overturning Roe v. Wade “does not undermine” other constitutional rights “in any way.”
However, in a concurring opinion conservative Justice Clarence Thomas says the court should reconsider other cases that fall under due process precedent. That means rulings that supports access to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage are also on the chopping block.
“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents … 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.”
The Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965 protects against state restrictions on contraception.
In 2003, the Lawrence v. Texas case invalidated sodomy law across the United States, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every State and United States territory.
In 2015 in Supreme Court ruled that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the rights of same-sex couples to get married in the same ways that opposite-sex couples can, in the Obergefell v. Hodges case
