Justice Thomas: SCOTUS ‘should reconsider’ contraception, same-sex marriage rulings

Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion released on Friday that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to access contraceptives, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.

The sweeping suggestion from the current court’s longest-serving justice came in a concurring opinion he authored in response to the court’s ruling on Friday revoking the constitutional right to an abortion.

In his opinion, Thomas wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — referring to three cases having to do with Americans’ fundamental privacy, due process and equal protection rights.

Since last month, when POLITICO published an initial draft majority opinion of the court’s decision on Friday to strike down Roe v. Wade, Democratic politicians have repeatedly warned that such a ruling would lead to the reversal of other landmark privacy-related cases.

“If the rationale of the decision as released were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question. A whole range of rights,” President Joe Biden said of the draft opinion at the time. “And the idea [that] we’re letting the states make those decisions, localities make those decisions, would be a fundamental shift in what we’ve done.”