Joined by 47 Republicans, all 220 House Democrats voted on Tuesday to approve legislation to protect the rights to same-sex and interracial marriage, hoping to pre-empt any future attempts by the Supreme Court to take them away.
After intense debate, the House voted to codify same-sex and interracial marriage, the Associated Press reports. While 47 Republicans joined House Democrats in affirming these rights, 157 Republicans opposed the bill. Rather than wholly rejecting gay marriage in an election year, most GOPers who voted against the bill portrayed it as unnecessary given the many economic issues, including inflation, happening at home.
The House vote was a response not only to the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, but to justice Clarence Thomas’s explicit call in his written dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson for the Supreme Court to reconsider two landmark LGBTQ+ rights cases: Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized marriage equality, and Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the United States’ sodomy laws.
Though the House passed the bill with Republican support, whether Republican Senators will join their counterparts across the aisle is heavily in doubt. That puts Senate Republicans at odds with the American people, a record number of whom (71%, to be exact) support same-sex marriage. An even higher number of people support interracial marriage, with Gallup polling reporting that 94% of Americans support that right, affirmed in the Supreme court case Loving v. Virginia, according to the Associated Press.
The Respect for Marriage Act, if passed by the Senate, would repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. It would also prohibit states from denying out-of-state marriage licenses on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or national origin.
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLAAD, supported the House’s move in a statement. “We welcome today’s House passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, a critical step to enshrine existing protections for LGBTQ couples and families, as well as interracial couples,” she said. “We urge the Senate to take swift action to pass the Respect For Marriage Act to ensure our families continue to receive the protections that only marriage affords.”
Emboldened by the overturning of Roe v. Wade and a right-leaning majority in the Supreme Court, Republicans have been eyeing repealing many hard-fought and long-settled gains made by LGBTQ+ people. Even prior to Roe’s overturning, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, who was an architect of the state’s abortion ban, had his eye on reinstating Texas’s sodomy ban, calling the rights of queer people to have bodily autonomy, whether through sexuality or health care, “judicial concoctions.”
Get the best of what's queer. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here.
