Sen. Ted Cruz says SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage was ‘clearly wrong’
Sen. Ted Cruz said Saturday that the U.S. Supreme Court made a mistake when legalizing same-sex marriage.
The Texas Republican made the remarks while discussing the “vulnerability” of Obergefell v. Hodges — the 2015 landmark civil rights case in which the country’s highest court ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples — during an interview with conservative commentator Liz Wheeler.
He then shared the exchange on his YouTube channel.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing to examine a post-Roe America, focusing on the legal consequences of the Dobbs decision, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, July 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (Andrew Harnik/)
“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz said when asked what would be the arguments for overturning the case “if Obergefell was in front of the Supreme Court again.”
“Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell — some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting,” he said.
Cruz argued that if the Supreme Court had not ruled the way it did, “the democratic process would have continued to operate.”
However, in Obergefell v. Hodges, “the Court said, ‘No, we know better than you and now every state must sanction and permit gay marriage,” he said.
“That decision was clearly wrong when it was decided,” Cruz said, adding that the Court was “overreaching.”
And there it is. Ted Cruz says the Supreme Court was wrong to legalize same-sex marriage. pic.twitter.com/WoprwsLV4R
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) July 16, 2022
LGBTQ rights advocates have been on high alert since late June when the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
Even though Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to have gone a little further.
Thomas, in his concurring opinion, suggested that a reversal on rights involving same-sex marriages, gay sex, and birth control is not off the table.
“In future cases, 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,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” he wrote.
