One month after US supreme court Judge Clarence Thomas suggested that the Conservative majority could reconsider critical decisions that upheld a right to do so contraception and freedom for same-sex couples to marry, Democratic congressmen are pushing legislation to legislate for those protections.
This week, the House of Representatives will vote on two bills — the Right to Contraception Act and the Respect for Marriage Act — that states are expected to seek to undermine marriage equality and access to birth control after the Supreme Court had put downDeer vs Wade on June 24th.
Both measures were debated in the House Rules Committee on July 18. Several House Republicans have already signaled they will not support the bills. Plenary votes are expected later this week.
After the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion care Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationRepublican state legislators in the US enacted tough anti-abortion laws previously deemed unconstitutional, while conservative rights groups and right-wing Christian lobbyists — who have spent years questioning LGBT+ rights and reproductive health policies — seek to amend theirs to expand influence on the provincial legislature.
Without explicit federal protections, Democratic lawmakers have feared that, like abortion, access to contraception and the recognition of same-sex marriages may depend on state protections.
The 1973 decision in Roe v Wade relied on the protections afforded by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits states from “[depriving] any person’s life, liberty or property without due process of law” – granting of so-called “unlisted” rights not expressly mentioned in the document.
A consensus of opinion in the Dobbs Judge Thomas’s case suggested that the court “reconsider all of this court’s material precedents on due process” — including landmark cases of contraception, same-sex marriage and gay sex.
“Because every substantial determination of due process is ‘provenly wrong’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ found in those precedents,” Justice Thomas wrote. “The question that remains is whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
Such precedents include that of 1965 griswold vs connecticut, which ruled that states have no right to ban contraception, and 2015 Obergefell against Hodges, which ruled that same-sex couples could legally marry. A decision in 2003 Lawrence vs. Texas Laws banning same-sex sex struck down.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the House “will not sit back and allow extremist Republicans and their justice officials to restrict Americans’ access to contraception.”
“American women deserve to be able to make choices about their own bodies and lives, including whether to conceive and have children,” he said in a statement. “It’s a basic human right that House Democrats will defend with all their might.”
In support of moving forward with the Respect for Marriage Act, he said the “extremeist and precedent-ignoring Supreme Court decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson has shown us why it is critical to ensure that federal laws protect those whose constitutional rights could be threatened by Republican-controlled state legislatures.”
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On Monday, Democratic US Senator Dick Durbin told the Senate: “I don’t think this court will stop the subversion roe.”
He suggested Senate Democrats would push parallel efforts to protect marriage equality and contraception, though it’s unclear if there are enough votes in the evenly divided chamber, which has been repeatedly paralyzed by Republican disability.
The White House called for passage of the Right to Contraception Act in a statement Monday and warned that the outcome of the Dobbs Case “already had a devastating impact on women’s health and public health.”
“It will continue to have far-reaching implications that underscore the need to protect not only access to abortion, but access to reproductive health services more broadly,” the White House Office of Administration and Budget said. “Access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care — including all FDA-approved forms of birth control — is critical to millions of Americans, especially those living in states that ban or severely restrict abortion.”
In his opinion in the Dobbs In that case, Justice Samuel Alito cited an “unfounded fear” that the right to marital equality and contraception would be threatened, arguing that the decision concerned only constitutional protections for abortion.
But state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups that have tried to ban abortion from the moment of conception could also lead to challenges with emergency contraception or intrauterine devices or IUDs, according to abortion-rights advocates and legal analysts.
Three of the judges who appealed the Obergefell judgment on marriage equality are still in court.
senator ted cruz also recently suggested that the upper skin The decision was “clearly wrong when it was decided”. And the recently adopted official platform of the Texas Republican Party opposes “gay marriages, regardless of state of origin.”
State laws banning same-sex marriage remain on the books in more than 30 states, despite the upper skin decision which she declared unconstitutional.
“We cannot take anything for granted,” said a statement from Democratic US Rep. Chris Pappas, the state’s first openly gay congressman. “I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will listen to their constituents and defend each individual’s freedom to be themselves, to love who they choose and to marry the person of their choice.”
