“The former vice president and other prominent Republicans are not only praising the end of Roe v. Wade but signaling bigger plans to strip women of their rights”
I don’t doubt that he sincerely believes this to be right, but there is more than his moral conviction behind this public declaration. In pursuing the 2024 nomination, Pence is looking for a strategic differentiation from Trump and DeSantis, and this is an obvious appeal to the powerful evangelical base of the conservative movement.
Given that conservatives are feeling their oats because of the current configuration of the Supremes, many are wondering which other “unenumerated rights” may be threatened because they are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.
Clarence Thomas seems to have his sights set on other cases involving the right to privacy:
- The right to contraception that the court set out in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut.
- The court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that the Constitution prevents states from criminalizing private homosexual conduct
- The court’s declaration in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that gay individuals may marry the person of their choosing.
Thomas’s interest in Obergefell is an especially interesting one, since a direct precedent of that decision is Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. In Obergefell, the Supreme Court invoked Loving, among other cases, as precedent for its holding that states are required to allow people to marry whom they choose, under both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause.
Thomas is a black person married to a white person – the very situation that led to the conviction of the Lovings, which was overturned by the decision of the Supremes! If Loving were to be challenged, would Thomas have to recuse himself?
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Yes, that’s right. It seems impossible to believe, even for those of us who have lived through all the turbulent subsequent years, but as recently as when I was in college, Virginia had a law forbidding interracial marriage.