In the week since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, disrupting a 50-year precedent that legally ensured abortion rights across the country, Clarence Thomas and several other prominent politicians have begun calling for reevaluations of other landmark rulings.
Thomas himself wrote that, while the overturning of Roe did not directly affect rights other than abortion because the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to abortion, that interpretation should be applied to other landmark cases.
He specifically wrote in his ruling, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” Another section states, “We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”
The 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut established that married couples had a right to access contraceptives and birth control. Lawrence v. Texas is a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that established that states could not outlaw consensual, same-gender sex. In 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges set a precedent that made same-gender marriage legal across the country.
While Thomas has been very vocal about his desire to extend the overturning of Roe toward other landmark precedents, other court members have been more reserved. Justice Samuel Alito said in his ruling, regarding Roe, that his reasoning should only be applied to abortion and attempted to dismiss concerns that his rationale could be extended to Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.
The three liberal members of the court do not seem convinced by Alito’s statements stating, “And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work. 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.”
It is understandable that, amidst these decisions and statements that refer to fundamental rights people rely on as “errors,” people are scared and angry. However, we have to remember that the fight is far from over. We never would have gotten this far without the work of activists, and now we have to carry on their legacy.
