Still reeling from watching the U.S. Supreme Court strike down their beloved Roe abortion ruling, Democrats have gone on the offensive over fears the right-leaning court is eyeing the controversial Obergefell decision. That ruling in 2015 both legalized homosexual marriage in all 50 states and overturned laws banning it in approximately 35 of them.
And that left-wing fear for the future of Obergefell is valid, too.
In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court should “reconsider” other issues related to what he called “due process precedents,” which refers to legal debate over privacy and equal protection, Politico explained in a June 24 story.
The court’s three liberal justices took notice of Thomas’ opinion, too, and wrote in their dissenting opinion that “no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work.”
Democrats on Capitol Hill read Thomas’ opinion, too, which set up a hurriedly-scheduled vote Tuesday for the “Respect for Marriage Act.” The vote ended with a 267-157 vote, which including 47 GOP votes that sided with Democrats.
A vote in the U.S. Senate is uncertain, where both parties are evenly split, but Republican leaders in the Senate could take a hands-off approach to the hot-button issue just as GOP House leaders did before the House vote.
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality tells AFN the GOP votes were a “shocking betrayal” of the Republican Party platform, which supports biblical marriage and calls for banning same-sex marriage. That view of marriage comes from the 2016 GOP platform, when Donald Trump was nominated for president, which was adopted verbatim in 2020.
In a commentary denouncing this week’s 47 GOP votes, Family Research Council head Tony Perkins said the Republican National Committee agreed in 2016 to adopt a strongly-worded platform. It states that a traditional family and traditional marriage are the “foundation for a free society and has for millennia be entrusted with rearing children and instilling cultural values.”
In other words, the Republican Party recognized just six years ago that the nuclear family, led by a husband and wife, forms the foundation of a civilized society.
Farther down in the same section of the GOP platform, the RNC condemned Obergefell as a “lawless ruling” that “robbed” the right of Americans, at the state level, to legally define marriage as one man and one woman.
This week’s GOP support for the same-sex marriage bill might mean those strongly-worded statements are ancient history to many lawmakers in the Republican Party, even after it they have witnessed the transgender hysteria of Democrats, but LaBarbera says that means the party is adrift in the culture.
Back in his commentary, Perkins urged Republicans to recognize that Democrats are attempting to legalize same-sex marriage after an “activist” court already did that on their behalf.
“If times have truly changed, let them prove it,” he wrote. “But no Republican should embrace the judicial thuggery that robbed two-thirds of the country of their constitutional rights.”
