President Joe Biden said that it’s possible the Supreme Court will end same-sex couple’s constitutional right to get married after the Court ends the right to get an abortion.
Biden was talking about the leaked Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which showed that the Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the federal right to an abortion.
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Justice Samuel Alito argued in the draft that there is no “broader right to autonomy” in the Constitution and said that several other landmark civil rights cases – including Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized marriage equality in all 50 states) and Lawrence v. Texas (which ended state sodomy laws) – based on the right to privacy were also not “deeply rooted in history.”
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“Well, look, what we’re talking about here: it’s not only the brutality of taking away a woman’s right to control her own body and all the damage that does physically, psychologically, practically,” Biden said during his remarks at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Chicago earlier this week. “But it also, if you read the opinion — if it turns out to be the same opinion — basically says there is no such thing as a right to privacy.”
“Mark my words: If that decision holds, it’s not only we’re going to be fighting for a woman’s right to control her own body and the brutality that goes along with having to give birth in a circumstance that is something beyond what — that can be tolerated, but what else is going to happen?”
“They’re going to go after the right of the — Supreme Court decision on the right of same-sex marriage,” he continued. “They’re going to go after — they’re going to — we’re going to be back to Griswold vs. Connecticut, where there was a time in Connecticut law where it said a married couple, in the privacy of their own bedroom, cannot use contraception; it was a decision — the government can make the decision you can’t do that.”
“You’re going to see these decisions up for grabs and further split the United States. We’re going to be arguing about things we shouldn’t have to argue about.”
Biden also brought up the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida, which has led Republicans into a war on Disney.
“Did you ever think we’d be in a position in the year 2022 — we’d be talking about banning books in schools?” Biden said. “I mean, you know, the idea that you cannot mention — you cannot mention to the school. What’s going to happen to a gay child, an L[G]BTQ child in school?”
“I mean, this thing — it’s one thing to take on Disney World,” he said. “They’re going to storm Cinderella’s castle before this is over.”
