There is No mention of Contraception…Gay Intimacy/Same-Sex Marriage in the constitution ….

Justice Alito’s draft opinion is three months old, and it is all but certain that later drafts have clarified and sharpened his arguments. But the reasoning in the draft has alarmed supporters of gay rights, who say they fear that the final opinion, if it resembles the draft, could imperil hard-won victories.

“None of us are safe from the extreme anti-women and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. ideology that now dominates this court,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, said in a statement.

Justice Alito, for his part, has made no secret of his hostility to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision on same-sex marriage. In 2020, when the court turned down an appeal from a county clerk who had been sued for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, he joined a statement written by Justice Clarence Thomas that called the decision at odds with the Constitution.

“In Obergefell v. Hodges,” the statement said, “the court read a right to same-sex marriage into the 14th Amendment, even though that right is found nowhere in the text.”

That is the same argument the draft opinion makes about the right to abortion. Justice Alito’s efforts to distinguish the two questions, then, may strike some as halfhearted.

The primary distinction Justice Alito drew was that there was an important moral value at issue in Roe and in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed its central holding….

…

“Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions involving matters such as intimate sexual relations, contraception and marriage,” Justice Alito wrote, “but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being.’”

Justice Alito surveyed the precedents cited by Roe and Casey to justify their protection of abortion. They included ones on interracial marriage, the right of prisoners to marry, the right to live with relatives, the right to make decisions about the education of one’s children and the right not to be sterilized without consent.

He also cited two “post-Casey decisions,” Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, which struck down a Texas law that made gay sex a crime.

Justice Alito, a careful draftsman, then seemed to distinguish between the two sets of decisions.

“None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” he wrote. “They are therefore inapposite. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.”….

More…