The Idaho House of Representatives passed a petition this week that urges the Supreme Court to revisit the right to same-sex marriage.
House Joint Memorial 1, introduced Jan. 7 and passed by a 46-24 vote on Monday, “calls upon the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”
The vote didn’t have Democrat support.
The Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, ruling the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to same-sex marriage.
But after the high court reversed its landmark 1973 precedent in Roe v. Wade, which gave women a national right to abortion — sending the issue back to the states in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 — lawmakers have suggested the same should be done for same-sex marriage.
The memorial is sponsored by Republican state Rep. Heather Scott, who said it’s about state sovereignty, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic, a Washington state publication.
She said the high court “claimed to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, and it confused marriage laws and constitutions across the country.”
“This same Supreme Court used this same reasoning to make its decision for a right to privacy on Roe v. Wade, and that’s how they justified abortion, which, as we know, was overturned 50 years later. The federal government does not have the authority to just create rights out of thin air,” Ms. Scott said.
Supporters of gay marriage have worried that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would roll back the right after Justice Clarence Thomas authored a concurrence in the high court’s Dobbs ruling, which sent the abortion issue back to the states.
In his concurrence, the senior GOP appointee suggested the justices should revisit other rights created by the Supreme Court through substantive due process, the same reasoning the high court used to green-light abortion nationwide decades ago.
“As I have previously explained, ’substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ’lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.’ We should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ’demonstrably erroneous,’” he wrote, referencing cases that guaranteed the right to birth control, same-sex intimate relations and the right to marry.
Idaho’s Joint Memorial is a petition or proclamation, but it doesn’t carry the weight of a law. The Idaho House Joint Memorial 1 goes on to the Idaho Senate for consideration, but doesn’t need the governor’s signature, the Idaho Capital Sun reported.
Source: Washington Times
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