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Elenis – was brought by a website designer who said she has a free speech right to decline to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. The current pending case involving LGBTQ interests and First Amendment rights – 303 Creative v. That case was eventually reversed, in 2003, by a court majority that leaned, in fact, on the 1986 dissent by Stevens. Hardwick rejected arguments that the Constitution’s guarantee of personal liberty and privacy extends to consensual relations between gay men. Hodges that declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.īut Stevens, who retired in 2010 and died in 2019, sought broad constitutional protection for gay people including as he dissented in 1986 when the high court upheld a Georgia sodomy ban. Stevens, a 1975 appointee of Republican President Gerald Ford, is not as identified with a broad reading of individual privacy as was, for example, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, with whom Stevens served in his early years, or with LGBTQ interests, as was Justice Anthony Kennedy, who eventually became the author of major gay rights decisions, including the 2015 Obergefell v. Other liberals prevailed upon Stevens to remove the line. Such divisions are likely to continue when the court acts soon in another major case regarding First Amendment rights and LGBTQ interests.ĭraft language of a dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens that invoked the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision.
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The majority ruled that the organization could, based on its freedom of expressive association, exclude a gay scoutmaster because of the Scouts opposition to homosexuality.Īs the Supreme Court’s attitude toward gay rights has evolved in recent decades, dissenting justices have often divided in their level of moral outrage and how to express it publicly. Stevens ended up dropping the Nazi and Dred Scott references from his dissent to the majority’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. More broadly, he added, “It is important for us to recognize what this case represents: the latest in a long line of decisions influenced by historical prejudices and explained as the product of a Court caught in the midst of a sea change in social conventions and attitudes,” Stevens added.
“It is critical for the dissent to unmask that reality.” “(U)nderlying every analytical flaw the majority makes is its habitual way of thinking about homosexuals,” Stevens wrote in a memo addressed to Souter as he defended the use of Nazi imagery, as well as a reference to the Dred Scott opinion that endorsed slavery in 1857. Stevens initially objected, but softened some of his rhetoric to win their backing, a story revealed for the first time in the late justice’s personal papers – reviewed by CNN as the documents were opened this month at the Library of Congress.
Memos show how Supreme Court justices scramble at the end of the session
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