Idaho’s Republican-dominated state House of Representatives formally called on the Supreme Court to reverse a 2015 ruling that enshrined a fundamental right of same-sex couples to marry.
On Monday, Iowa’s House voted 46-24 to pass a resolution that states the legislature rejects the landmark ruling in Obergefell v Hodges and calls on justices to “restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”
The measure does not carry the force of law, but it signals how right-wing opposition to LGBT+ rights is emboldened under Donald Trump’s administration to test the vulnerability of Supreme Court precedents.
Only 15 House Republicans joined all Idaho Democrats in opposition. The measure now heads to a state senate committee for consideration.
“Extremist attacks have become de rigueur, and LGBTQ+ Americans are right to be concerned about their escalation,” Sarah Warbelow, the Human Rights Campaign’s vice president for legal affairs, told The Advocate.
“This cruel action by Idaho Republicans amounts to nothing more than shouting at the wind,” Warbelow said. “A majority of Americans of all political affiliations support marriage equality. Resolutions are not laws, and state legislatures lack the power to dismantle marriage equality.”
The ACLU of Idaho is “deeply disappointed and frustrated” with the measure’s passage, communications director Rebecca De Leon told The Independent.
A measure expressing a “bigoted and unpopular view on same-sex marriage is an affront to queer people in this state, and is a grasp at power that is well beyond the scope of a state entity,” De Leon said. “Idaho has many real, complex problems that the legislature should be addressing, not wasting time on toothless virtue-signaling.”
The measure, proposed by GOP state Rep. Heather Scott and endorsed by anti-LGBT+ activists, states that the Obergefell decision is “at odds with the Constitution of the United States and the principles upon which the United States is established” and “insists on restoring the issue of marriage and enforcement of all laws pertaining to marriage back to the several states and the people.”
In 2006, Idaho voters passed an amendment to the state Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, though the Supreme Court’s ruling nearly a decade later found that such laws violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection and due process guarantees.
The high court’s ruling “confused marriage laws and constitutions across the country,” Scott said in remarks on the state House floor Monday.
“This same Supreme Court used this same reasoning to make its decision for a right to privacy on Roe v Wade, and that’s how they justified abortion, which, as we know, was overturned 50 years later,” she said. “The federal government does not have the authority to just create rights out of thin air.”
In his concurring opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe and revoked a constitutional right to abortion care, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the court could “reconsider” major cases involving “substantive due process precedents” — including the court’s landmark cases involving same-sex marriages, gay sex, and contraception.
“Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’... we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” Thomas wrote. “The question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
Those cases include Griswold v Connecticut, which ruled that states had no right to ban contraception; Lawrence v Texas, which struck down laws banning same-sex sex; and Obergefell v Hodges, which ruled that same-sex couples could legally marry.
In their dissenting opinion in Dobbs, liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor argued that the three cases mentioned by Thomas “are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decision making over the most personal of life decisions.”
“So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure,” they wrote. “Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”
