Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage, responded to Justice Clarence Thomas writing separately to call explicitly for the court to reconsider its rulings striking down state restrictions on contraceptives, state sodomy bans and state prohibitions on same-sex marriage.
“Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court justice appointed by humans, he is not the Supreme Deity. The millions of loving couples who have the right to marriage equality to form their own families do not need Clarence Thomas imposing his individual twisted morality upon them. If you want to see an error in judgment, Clarence Thomas, look in the mirror,” said Obergefell, also a candidate for the Ohio House, in a statement.
In their dissent, the liberal justices wrote “no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”
“The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone,” they wrote. “To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage.”
Obergefell called the overturning of Roe v. Wade “a sad day” for women’s rights.
“The reality is that women today will have less rights than their own mothers. We are going backwards and it’s both enraging and terrifying to see the excessive government overreach that this court is imposing on our country,” he said.
