Apparently not satisfied with fellow Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s strident majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring but separate opinion Friday calling for the court to reconsider other landmark cases.

”We should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas declared.

Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965, found that married couples have a constitutional right to buy and use contraceptives. Lawrence v. Texas, 2003, outlawed state interference in consensual gay sexual relations. Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015, found that gay couples have a constitutional right to marriage.

Those decisions and Roe v. Wade were rooted in the 14th Amendment, which proscribes governments from depriving citizens of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Thomas omitted from his list another case rooted in the 14th Amendment — Loving v. Virginia — that was a civil rights triumph. Decided in 1963, it overruled Jim Crow-era “miscegenation” laws, and established that interracial couples have a constitutional right to marry.

Thomas, who is Black, is married to Ginni Thomas, a far-right political activist, who is white.

Many constitutional experts have said it would be quite a feat for Thomas to take on Lawrence, Griswold and Obergefell while leaving Loving intact, because they all flow from the same line of reasoning. That is especially true of Obergefell, which specifically cited the Loving decision as precedent.

Fortunately, for now, Thomas seems an outlier in terms of his desire to unravel all fundamental constitutional protections for personal relationships … well, almost all.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS