Jim Obergefell is scared.
When he saw the news on Friday of the landmark Supreme Court decision to strike down roe v. calf, Obergefell instantly felt horrible for women across the country. But when he read Judge Clarence Thomas’s opinion that threatened to undo marriage equality, he was scared for himself.
“Honestly, I’d be lying if I said I’m not afraid it’s all going to go away,” Obergefell said of LGBTQ civil rights he helped secure thanks to his role as lead plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized marriage for people same. -sexual partners nationwide.
“He made me angry, and he has me terrified. It worries me,” Obergefell told BuzzFeed News.
In their searing dissent in Friday’s abortion case, the three liberal justices warned that in addition to vaporizing federal abortion rights, the US Supreme Court was also threatening the future of things like the right to contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
“No one should be sure that this majority is done with its job,” the Liberals wrote.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito accused liberal justices of using their dissent to potentially “stoke an unfounded fear” that the ruling would jeopardize these other rights, arguing that they were different because they did not refer to “potential life.” ”.
“To ensure that our decision is not misconstrued or misconstrued, we emphasize that our decision refers to the constitutional right to abortion and no other right,” Alito wrote. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood as calling into question non-abortion precedents.”
But not everyone in the majority seemed to agree.
In his separate opinion, agreeing with the majority that there was no constitutional right to abortion, Thomas said the court should reconsider all cases that previously established those rights.
In a passage criticizing the case law surrounding the 14th Amendment, Thomas said that abortion was not a form of “liberty” protected by the due process clause.
He then expressly named the cases that guaranteed the rights to contraception, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage: Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Lorenzo v. Texas (2003), other Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), respectively, as appropriate for the court to “reconsider” given that they relied on similar reasoning.
“We have a duty to ‘correct the error’ set forth in those precedents,” Thomas wrote.
(observers indicated that Thomas, a black man who is married to a white woman, did not say the court should reconsider love v Virginia, the 1967 case which also relied on the 14th Amendment to guarantee interracial marriage rights).