WASHINGTON — House Democrats passed legislation Tuesday to strengthen same-sex marriage rights as Republicans emboldened by comments from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas hope to topple other precedents following the reversal of Roe vs. Wade.
In a concurring opinion in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health decision which removed the constitutional right to abortion, Thomas wrote the court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” These cases all involved Americans’ right to privacy, due process and equal protection rights.
Lawrence vs. Texas and Obergefell vs. Hodges are also two landmark cases for LGBT rights.
As a response, Democrats introduced the Respect for Marriage Act, which offers protections for same-sex and interracial marriages. It would require states to recognize marriages legally performed in other states by prohibiting any state from denying out-of-state licenses and benefits on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or national origin.
The legislation would also repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.
Forty-seven Republicans joined Democrats to pass the bill. Uvalde Rep. Tony Gonzales was the only Texas Republican to vote in favor of the bill.
House Democrats addressed Thomas’ concurring opinion during debate on the bill on Tuesday, and used it to demonstrate the need to codify the rights to same-sex and interracial marriages.
“Since the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade we’ve seen unalienable rights like the right to choose how and who to form a family with openly questioned by justices on the Supreme Court and right-wing politicians,” said Dallas Rep. Colin Allred on the House floor. “What right could be more foundational? Their marriages, their family, their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is worth protecting.”
On the other side of the aisle, Republicans in the debate argued rights like same-sex marriage and contraception were secure, and that the court was solely focused on abortion in its Dobbs ruling.
No other justices joined Thomas in his opinion, and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly wrote the decision only related to abortion.
“Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Alito wrote in the majority opinion.
Austin Republican Rep. Chip Roy said Thomas was pointing out concerns with “how we make the law, how we recognize law,” but wasn’t issuing a definitive conclusion on those questions.
“Republicans will be voting on this floor today on the question of whether the federal government should tell Texas what marriages they have to recognize, irrespective of what the court has said,” Roy said.
Conservatives have joined Thomas in criticizing the Obergefell ruling. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared a clip Saturday of an interview with conservative commentator Liz Wheeler in which he said Obergefell was “clearly wrong” and an overreach. He said he thinks the issue should have remained in the states, but said the court would have challenges overturning the ruling.
“You’ve got a ton of people who have entered into gay marriages and it would be more than a little chaotic for the court to do something that somehow disrupted those marriages that had been entered into in accordance with the law,” Cruz said in the clip.
Despite rulings in Obergefell and Lawrence, Texas legislators have refused to remove state bans on same-sex marriage and sex. These bans are unenforceable but have been used by some to confuse and harass LGBT people.
More recently during the Texas GOP Convention in July, the party platform adopted anti-LGBT language calling homosexuality “abnormal.”
“We will not allow this right-wing obsession to impose their personal religious views on people’s private lives to go any further,” Houston Rep. Sylvia Garcia said during the House debate Tuesday. “To my colleagues across the aisle and to the Texas GOP, marrying the person you love is not abnormal. It’s frankly none of your business.”
President Joe Biden endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act in a statement Tuesday, writing “this legislation would strengthen civil rights, and ensure that the promise of equality is not denied to families across the country.”
Democrats are expected to have trouble securing the 60 votes necessary to beat the filibuster in the Senate.
Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case and an Ohio congressional candidate, spoke on CNN ahead of the House vote and said he hopes senators do stand up for LGBT rights and pass the bill.
“I want to believe … that senators in the United States Senate have realized, they have seen that marriages between two people of the same sex have not harmed any other marriage or any other person in this country,” Obergefell said on CNN.
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