Mike Johnson Wants to Take Away Gay Marriage and Birth Control Rights

Audio is circulating of Republican Speaker Mike Johnson supporting Justice Clarence Thomas’s 2022 suggestion that the Supreme Court overturn Constitutional rights to birth control and gay marriage.

In the recording—originally sourced to a June 2022 episode of ToddCast, a right wing podcast hosted by Todd Starnes—Johnson opined that “there’s been some really bad laws made” and that previous iterations of the Supreme Court have “made a mess of our jurisprudence for the last, y’know, several decades.”

“And maybe some of that needs to be cleaned up,” Johnson said, “And what, what Justice Thomas is calling for is not radical. In fact, it’s the opposite of that.”

“What Justice Thomas is calling for” is a reference to part of Thomas’s concurring opinion in the controversial Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, decided on June 24, 2022, in which the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey—revoking the Constitutional right to an abortion.

Though Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, claimed the Court was not trying to “cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Thomas suggested that “in future cases,should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

These refer, respectively, to the right to birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut), the right to “engage in private, consensual acts” (Lawrence v. Texas), and “the right to same-sex marriage” (Obergefell v. Hodges).

The fact that the most powerful elected Republican supports the revocation of these Constitutional protections should alarm the majority of American voters, who support these rights by overwhelming margins.

As we head into the 2024 election cycle, this recording further underscores the threat of Republican control over Congress and the White House, and can hopefully be leveraged to motivate high voter turnout.