Thread by @studentactivism

Overturning Obergefell would allow de-recognition of same-sex marriages. Overturning Lawrence would open the door to the return of sodomy laws.

https://twitter.com/ProfMMurray/status/1439226459709714434

For a long time I thought some of these victories were pretty much safe, just because their outcomes are now broadly popular. But an antidemocratic political movement doesn't have to care about popularity in the same way that a party that has to win free and fair elections does.

Sodomy laws were almost entirely unenforced for quite a while before the Lawrence decision. But if we've learned one thing from the last five years, it's that norms, precedent, and tradition mean nothing to the modern Republican Party.

And if Roe falls, if Obergefell falls, then it's not just Lawrence we have to worry about, but Griswold, too.

Griswold v. Connecticut, decided in 1965, was the first in the Court's modern string of privacy cases, the bedrock upon which Roe and Obergefell and Lawrence were built.

In Griswold, the Supreme Court ruled that it was an unconstitutional invasion of marital privacy for the state to ban the use of contraception. (The ruling was extended to cover unmarried people in the Eisenstadt case in 1972.)

The animating spirit of Roe and Obergefell and Lawrence is the logic of Griswold. If any falls, all are in danger.

That doesn't mean that the Court is likely to openly repudiate Griswold any time soon, or that states are going to start banning condoms as test cases. But.

The further the Court goes down its current path, the more state and local legislators will be emboldened to pursue bans on Plan B, restrictions on access to birth control pills, new regulation of IUDs and implants, bans on open display or advertising of contraceptives.

And it's not just legislators, either. It's the cop who makes a sodomy arrest in a state where the laws weren't removed from the books after Lawrence. The zoning board that tries to ban pharmacies from selling condoms to minors.

And the Court wouldn't have to embrace these acts, either. They could just declare, loudly or silently, that such injustices are none of their business—questions for politicians, not justices, to resolve.