Amid the fallout of the leaked Supreme Court decision that could overturn the historic abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden has warned that such a precedent could open the door to an even larger state-by-state assault on civil rights by the Republican party.
On Wednesday, during remarks to members of the press at the White House, Biden said that Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion — which would allow individual states to determine the legality of abortions — would also allow legislators from what he called the “MAGA crowd” to restrict individual rights that were previously protected under federal law, and LGBTQ+ protections in particular.
“What happens if you have states changing the law, saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children?” Biden queried. “Is that legit, under the way that the decision’s written?”
Biden also criticized Republicans more broadly, calling the party “the most extreme political organization” in recent American history.
Of course, this isn’t a matter of LGBTQ+ rights being “next” for the GOP, nor is Biden’s scenario a hypothetical. With 2022 already the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the U.S., conservatives have made attacking trans youth into a load-bearing plank of their midterm platforms. These attacks have been bold and far-reaching, including new laws in Oklahoma and Iowa aimed at removing teenage trans athletes from sports teams, the censorship of LGBTQ+ books in school libraries, and even one ban on nonbinary birth certificates (again in Oklahoma, where Gov. Kevin Stitt has decided nobody can have nice things).
As American Civil Liberties Union communication strategist Gillian Branstetter noted on Twitter, lawyers representing right-wing organizations — including the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that has bankrolled and ghostwritten anti-trans bills around the country for years — contend that the mere presence of trans people violates others’ privacy. Matt Sharp, a senior counsel for the ADF, wrote in 2017 on the organization’s official blog that if a teenage trans girl shares a locker room or bathroom with cis girls, her “presence immediately violates the bodily privacy rights of every girl forced to share facilities with [her].”
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It’s not hard to draw a direct line from Sharp’s rhetoric to the idea that openly trans kids are inappropriate in any school setting, especially when you factor in the GOP’s ongoing efforts to stifle any mention of LGBTQ+ identity in classrooms. By codifying certain identities as inherent displays of sexuality, conservatives are laying the foundation for compulsory cisgender, heterosexual identification in schools and, perhaps, other public spaces. And, of course, some GOP elected officials have already targeted classrooms as the next great LGBTQ+ battleground, with bills like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and a South Dakota bill banning “divisive concepts” such as homophobia or transphobia attributed to straight or cis people.
You don’t have to be a militant queer rights activist to oppose the Court’s devastating decision to overturn Roe — but Biden’s right about at least one thing: the ruling has major implications for much more than abortion rights alone. If Alito’s leaked opinion is indeed published as written, queer people in the U.S. will have to prepare for even darker legal storms ahead.
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