Topeka, Cannes. ( Associated Press) — The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow states to ban abortion sparked a flurry Friday among LGBTQ advocates who feared the ruling could someday allow a rollback of legal protections for gay relationships including the rights of same-sex couples. to marry.
In the court’s majority opinion overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Justice Samuel Alito held that the decision applied only to abortion. But critics of the court’s conservative majority did not give the statement any credibility.
“I don’t buy it at all,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor of medicine at Georgetown University and faculty director of its Institute for National and Global Health Law. “It’s actually a lot more extreme than the judges are making it up to be.”
He added: “It means you can’t see the Supreme Court as an impartial arbiter of constitutional rights because they are acting more as culture warriors.”
Gostin and others pointed to a different consent opinion in which Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should review other examples, including a 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage, a 2003 decision criminalizing same-sex sex. The laws and the 1965 judgment include declaring married couples. Right to use contraception.
“Today is about this terrible invasion of privacy that this court is now allowing, and when we lose one right that we have relied on and enjoyed, other rights are at risk,” said Jim Oberjfeld Said, the plaintiffs in the landmark ruling legalized it—sex marriage, which is now running as a Democrat for the Ohio House.
Abortion opponents celebrate the ability of states to ban abortions nearly 50 years after they stopped doing so. Some argued that the matter had no further implications in keeping with Alito’s words.
“And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or misunderstood, we emphasize that our decision relates to the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito wrote. “Nothing should be construed in this opinion as to cast doubt on the precedents relating to abortion.”
Kristen Wagner, legal director of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which helped defend Mississippi abortion law at issue in the ruling, said the high court’s decision makes it clear that “taking a human life is unlike any other issue. ” He said the raising of other issues shows the weakness of critics’ arguments about abortion.
Still, Paul DuPont, a spokesman for the conservative Anti-Abortion American Principles Project, said conservatives are optimistic about the prospect of a future victory on cultural issues, although getting more states to ban abortion is “a big enough battle.” Is.”
“If there’s any idea that it might apply elsewhere, you know, they’re not going to say it here, and we’ll just have to see,” DuPont said.
Other factors may protect those decisions on birth control and LGBTQ rights as well. The Obergfels Decision legalizing same-sex marriage was based on equal protection, and hundreds of thousands of couples have relied on it to marry, a precedent that many courts would be willing to bother.
Still, the sharp rise in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric in the US and opposition to specific types of birth control over the right has worried advocates that those rights are undermined.
The prospect worried some at an abortion-rights rally Friday evening outside the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka. Including Riza Nazir, a 21-year-old community organizer from Wichita for the voting-rights group.
She wore a pink cowboy hat with buttons bearing the picture “Cowboy Uterus” for the “Vote Now” campaign against the anti-abortion measure at the statewide vote on August 2.
“They’re going to go for LGBTQ rights first and then gay marriage. Who knows? Maybe interracial marriage, birth control,” Nazir said. “They’re not going to stop at abortion.”
Some anti-abortion contraception consider some forms of contraception to be forms of abortion, particularly the IUD and emergency birth control such as Plan B, also known as the “morning-after” pill. Idaho and Missouri lawmakers last year discussed banning state funding for emergency contraception, and prohibiting Idaho public schools or universities from spreading it.
“It’s all intertwined because, at its base, birth control and abortion are both types of health care that help people have physical autonomy,” said Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access for the National Women’s Law Center. who supports abortion rights. , “I’m very concerned about where this is going.”
The three most liberal members of the Supreme Court argued that the majority decision “violates a basic rule-of-principle designed to promote consistency in law” and “places other rights at risk”.
At the White House, President Joe Biden pledged to do everything in his power to protect a woman’s right to have an abortion in states where it would be banned. He warned that the ruling could undermine rights to contraception and same-sex marriage: “This is an extreme and dangerous path.”
Then there’s Thomas’s agreed-upon opinion, which Sarah Warbello, the legal director of the LGBTQ-rights human rights campaign, called “an invitation to incite fringe organizations, fringe politicians who want to harm the LGBTQ community.”
“There are clearly members of the court who have an age-old notion of what America looks like today and a return to their portrayed idealism of America of the 1940s, 1950s, certainly in the 1940s and ’50s. was not.” he said. “And it’s scary.”
University of Illinois political scientist Jason Pearson said he does not see the conservative majority deterring abortion.
“They are sending signals to the conservative legal movement, which has a lot of momentum right now because of this victory, to move forward and bring cases to them over the next several years that will give them opportunities to move forward,” Pearson said.
Jennifer Pizar, acting chief legal officer of LGBTQ-rights group Lambda Legal, said: “This is an extremist attack on the privacy, self-determination, dignity and equality of every person in our country.”
,
This story has been corrected to show that Lawrence Gostin’s title is Faculty Director, not Georgetown Institute Director.
,
Associated Press writers Jessica Gresco in Washington, Susan High in Hartford, Connecticut, Julie Carr Smith in Columbus, Ohio and Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.
,
Follow John Hannah on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdanna
,
For full coverage of Associated Press’s Supreme Court decision on abortion, visit https://apnews.com/hub/abortion.
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
