Americans are afraid that homosexual marriage will end up like abortion

US public opinion expressed fear this Sunday that other decisions made years ago by the Supreme Court about abortion, such as the legality of gay marriage or the right to use contraceptive methods, will be revoked by the Court, as has happened with the right to abortion. Media such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the CNN network agreed that the same constitutional logic used to revoke the sentence that gave legal protection to abortion could be used to end several rights dictated by the jurisprudence but that are not directly collected. in any federal law.

The main argument used on Friday by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court to revoke the 1973 ruling baptized as “Roe v. Wade” that legally protected abortion was that it is not explicitly included in the US Constitution -which dates from 1787 -, and that the 1973 Court had exceeded its interpretation of the Magna Carta.

Same-sex marriage and the right to use contraceptives, like abortion until now, are not protected by any federal law that explicitly recognizes them, but rather emanates from the interpretations that the Supreme Court magistrates made concerning its fit into the Constitution.

In Friday’s ruling, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – the only African-American on the Court and one of the most conservative judges – issued an opinion of his own in which he directly encouraged his colleagues to review other rulings issued in the past using the same prism than in the abortion decision.

“We have a duty to right the wrong set by precedents such as Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote in his opinion. These three cases mentioned by the judge are those that protect, respectively, the right to obtain contraceptive methods (1965); the right to have private sexual relations (2003) -which implicitly prohibited any punishment for homosexuality-; and the right to same-sex marriage (2015).

Thomas’s words are especially relevant because they are a clear signal for the conservative groups that fight against these types of issues in court to take their legal battle to the Supreme Court, knowing now that they have at least one ally there, and perhaps the support of the majority.