After the right to abortion, what else? In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal last week of the ruling Roe v. wade on the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy, fears are now growing in the face of the dominant conservative fringe within the highest court in the country, which could attack other fundamental rights in the future.
Conservative Judge Clarence Thomas, appointed by former President George Bush Sr. in 1991, stirred up these concerns on Friday by citing in his separate opinion on Roe v. wade causes that he calls for “reconsidering”. Panorama.
Access to contraception
Judge Thomas named it: the judgment Griswold v. Connecticut, dating from 1965, now seems to be in the sights of the Supreme Court. If he too were to be invalidated, it would complicate access to contraceptives for married couples.
Indeed, the landmark Supreme Court decision that year found unconstitutional an 1879 Connecticut law prohibiting persons from using “any drug, medical article or instrument for the purpose of preventing design “.
For the Court, this law also had the effect of “denying disadvantaged citizens […] access to medical assistance and up-to-date information regarding appropriate methods of birth control”.
Same-sex couples
“No one should believe that this majority is done with its job,” liberal Supreme Court justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in their joint dissenting opinion on Roe v. wade. And in the wake of abortion, same-sex marriage could in the future bear the brunt of it, with the questioning of another historic decision: Oberfell v. Hodges.
In 2015, the highest court in the land upheld the fundamental right to marriage for every person, everywhere in the country, thereby recognizing same-sex couples and obliging all states to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.
“The case law established [par l’arrêt sur l’avortement] is not isolated, added the dissenting judges. Rather, the Court has tied it for decades to other established freedoms involving bodily integrity, family relationships, and procreation. »
consensual same-sex relationships
Even further in privacy, the conservative justices of the United States Supreme Court no longer hide their intentions to criminalize homosexuality again by invalidating the judgment Lawrence v. Texas who, in 2003, legalized sodomy. By this decision, the highest court in the country then recognized the right to privacy and above all the autonomy of individuals “to define [leur] own relationships” in “American traditions of non-interference in private sexual decisions between consenting adults”.
However, by referring to this judgment, in his decision on abortion, as “future cases”, Judge Thomas announces the weakening of this achievement.
” It’s clear that [Clarence Thomas] and the majority of the court have no respect for the precedents created over the past decades,” said Progressive Congressional Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal.
“Five Republican judges appointed by presidents who have lost the popular vote routinely make hyperpartisan decisions that disenfranchise Americans,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, as quoted by The Guardian.
A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans who express confidence in the Supreme Court now make up just 25% of those polled, down from 36% just a year ago. This is the biggest drop in confidence recorded since… 1973.
Freedom of speech
And as if that were not enough, on Monday, the same judge Thomas said he was ready to attack a judgment dating from 1964 and which limits lawsuits against the media for defamation. The decision is known as New York Times Co.v. Sullivan and essentially stipulates that public figures who sue a media outlet for defamation must prove that the defendants broadcast defamatory statements, but that these statements were also made with “actual malice”.
The Conservative’s comment followed the Supreme Court’s decision announced Monday to reject an appeal by a religious group, the Coral Ridge Ministries Media, which accuses the civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, of publicly placing him on a list of organizations inciting hatred and discrimination. This characterization, made because of the religious movement’s numerous anti-LGBTQ+ statements, now blocks access to donations.
For Clarence Thomas, stopping New York Times Co.v. Sullivan “enabled media organizations and interest groups” to make false accusations against public figures with impunity, he wrote.
Difficult to say how many other conservative judges could support him in his approach. But last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump, expressed a similar and concurring opinion on this historic judgment.