After abortion, gay marriage? Fear in the United States for the cut of more rights

Behind the abortion, gay marriage? If the United States Supreme Court wipes out women’s right to have an abortion, jurists and activists fear that same-sex marriage, legal throughout the country since 2015, will be the conservatives’ next target.

After the leak of a draft of the project of the highest legal authority in the country to repeal the right to abortion enshrined in a 1973 court ruling, known as “Roe versus Wade“, President Joe Biden warned that “all decisions about the private life” of Americans and “and a series of other rights” are at stake.

LOOK: What is the “Roe v. Wade” case that guarantees abortion in the United States?

Among them, contraception and same-sex marriage.

In New York, the metropolis with a leftist soul and a historic bastion of movements in support of minorities and people LGBTQthousands of protesters came out Tuesday night to let their “rage” be heard in Manhattan.

LOOK: The unusual leak of the US Supreme Court that suggests the end of abortion as a constitutional right

The demonstrators of both sexes, many of whom do not feel represented by the jurists of the Court or by politicians, warned that the conservative attack will not stop with abortion.

“The next?”

“Which one is next? What’s next, what’s next? the attorney general of the state of new york shrieked, Letitia James, Democrat, feminist and African-American. For the magistrate fundamental US constitutional rights allow anyone to “marry whoever they want” and “members of the LGBT community to have rights”.

Same-sex marriage, a highly sensitive issue in USAhas been recognized at the federal level since the Supreme Court ruling in June 2015. Therefore, it is imposed on the 50 federated states, including those, particularly in the center and south of the country, that expressly prohibited it in their constitutions.

LOOK: How would the US abortion landscape change if “Roe v. Wade” is repealed?

If the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority with six of the nine judges that make it up, blows up the right to abortion, jurists in New York questioned by AFP fear that the high jurisdiction will also do the same with other individual rights.

These experts are based on the draft that the conservative judge wrote Samuel Alito of the Court, revealed on Monday by the digital newspaper Politico, which had the effect of a bomb.

“Unfounded”

The “Roe vs. Wade” ruling, which bases the right to abortion on the constitutional right to respect private life, “is unfounded from the start,” Judge Alito writessince “it is not protected by any provision of the Constitution” of the United States.

The 14th amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, makes no reference to particular fundamental rights. But it prohibits the state from “depriving a person of his life, her liberty, or property without due process of law.”

The jurisprudence of the US courts has been based for years on these provisions to guarantee individual rights and freedoms such as contraception, abortion or homosexual marriage.

But for the judge wing, to be guaranteed these rights should be “deeply rooted in the history and tradition of this nation.” Which is not the case with abortion, according to the judge, who maintains that at the time of the 14th amendment, “three-quarters of the (American) states considered abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy.”

“Abrogate”

With this legal reasoning, the Supreme Court could “abrogate constitutional rights that generations of Americans consider acquired,” denounces Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke.

“Not only abortion, but contraception, marriage between people of the same sex and the criminalization of sexuality outside of marriage or between people of the same sex,” it reveals.

His New York Law School colleague Arthur Leonard thinks the “temptation is there … to take these matters to the Supreme Court.”

“There are right-wing people in the United States – many for religious reasons, others for moral reasons – who are against same-sex marriage and sexuality,” he told AFP.

Liza, 73, who did not want to give her last name at Tuesday’s demonstration in New York, told AFP that she “would never have thought of going backwards” in terms of private life after half a century in her country.

Source: Elcomercio

Deshawn