The conservative Supreme Court will now use their opinions to shift law against us

Supreme Court of the United States
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

With the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the LGBTQ community is about to move from an era of expanded rights to one of expanded restrictions on those rights.

The judiciary was often willing to push the boundaries at a time when public support was far less accepting than it is today. It’s fair to say that the courts often preceded public opinion in accepting the rights of LGBTQ citizens.

Related: The LGBTQ community needs Biden to pack the Supreme Court if he takes office

For decades, the courts were the vehicle for recognizing and protecting the rights of LGBTQ people. Thanks to the hard work of groups like Lambda Legal, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, the ACLU and others, the courts came to see discrimination against LGBTQ people was wrong.

The clearest example of that was marriage equality. Federal courts were willing to strike down bans on same-sex marriages at a time when a majority of the country was clearly opposed to the idea. The Supreme Court’s first ruling on marriage equality was intentionally narrow out of a concern about getting too far ahead of public opinion. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited that issue as the reason why abortion rights also remain contentious.)

Today, two-thirds of Americans are perfectly fine with marriage equality. But beyond that, the battle to erode the other rights LGBTQ people need lies ahead.

Barrett and the conservative justices already on the Court see religious people — and more specifically, conservative Christians — as the new marginalized Americans. They believe that conservative Christians are having their rights violated as society turns increasingly secular.

Christians are the group that the Court seeks to protect now. That will come at the expense of LGBTQ rights.

The conservative wing of the Court pretty clearly believes that…

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