Anti-LGBTQ pundit Ben Shapiro says the Supreme Court should overturn its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, but he doesn’t believe the court actually will.
Shapiro made his comments while addressing the recent Supreme Court leak of its upcoming abortion ruling. The ruling shows that the Court has voted to overtun Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court decision that protects the right to abortion. Legal experts, LGBTQ activists, and allies worry that the ruling’s reasoning will be used to overturn the court’s other landmark civil rights decisions based on the same due process argument as Roe, such as the rulings legalizing same-sex marriage and ending sodomy laws.
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“Obergefell is a bad Supreme Court decision and if we had a Supreme Court worth its salt, they would overturn Obergefell. But they’re not going to,” Shapiro said during the May 4 installment of The Daily Wire’s The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Shapiro then said that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote numerous times in his leaked decision that his ruling would have no impact on other cases of different lines, “which is a clear reference to Obergefell,” he claimed.
“Democrats… know that the abortion issue is not a winner,” he said. “So they’re trying to expand it out – well, you never know. The Supreme Court, they might go after gay rights, they might go after — sure, you’re right. The same Supreme Court in which Neil Gorsuch idiotically ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 covers transgender people is now going to overrule Obergefell.”
Shapiro’s was referring to Trump-nominated Justice Gorsuch’s June 2020 vote in favor of protecting LGBTQ people from workplace discrimination in Bostock v. Clayton Co. Anti-LGBTQ discrimination is often rooted in disapproval of queer people not adhering to traditional gender roles. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids gender-based discrimination, the court’s ruling reasoned, the federal law should also protect people from behaving outside of expected gender “norms.”
While Shapiro seems confident that the court won’t overturn same-sex marriage, numerous legal experts disagree, especially considering the court’s conservative majority.
It also makes that Shapiro supports overturning same-sex marriage. He has previously said that he doesn’t think that children should know that same-sex marriage exists. He also criticized the Oreo cookie brand for airing a gay-inclusive advertisement that “affirm[s] your sexual lifestyle,” he said.
