Clarence Thomas said on Friday that landmark high court rulings that established gay rights should be reconsidered now that the federal right to abortion has been revoked.
Thomas said that the rulings were incorrect.
In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples have the right to obtain contraceptives.
It does not have the force of legal precedent and it does not compel the Supreme Court to act on Thomas' suggestion.
It's an implicit invitation to conservative lawmakers in individual states to pass legislation that might run afoul of the Supreme Court's past decisions
The tack conservative lawmakers took in multiple states was to pass restrictive abortion laws in hopes that a challenge to them would open the door for federal abortion rights to be overturned.
That is what happened on Friday when the Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi abortion law that imposed more restrictions on the procedure than the court allowed in 1973. There was a case from the 1990s that made clear that there was a right to abortion.
The rationale for tossing out the decision to overturn the abortion law was cited by Thomas in the concurring opinion.
The Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to abortion according to the court.
No state shalldeprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
Thomas argued that the right to abortion is not related to the history and tradition of the nation.
The three cases Thomas now says should be reconsidered by the court are not at issue.
They are all based on the Due Process Clause.
He said that they are based on the idea ofstantive due process, which he called an oxymoron.
The substance of those rights can't be defined by the constitutional clause that guarantees only process, Thomas said.
In future cases, we should reconsider all of the court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.
We have a duty to correct the error that has been established in those precedents.
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