Justice Samuel Alito is concerned.
What is it this time, you might wonder?
Well, the Republican-appointed justice wrote Tuesday that he’s worried about a Missouri case which, as he put it, “reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian.”
The case that furrowed Alito’s brow involves Jean Finney, a lesbian who sued her employer under state law barring sex discrimination. At trial, her lawyer asked prospective jurors whether they thought that homosexuals shouldn’t have the same rights as everyone else. Potential jurors were dismissed when they cited a religious belief that homosexuality is a sin.
Though Alito reluctantly agreed with his colleagues (for procedural reasons) not to take up the appeal, he penned his statement because he’s “concerned that the lower court’s reasoning may spread and may be a foretaste of things to come.” He added that the case “exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges,” the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that approved same-sex marriage.
Alito, of course, dissented in Obergefell, where he expressed his anxiety that people who hold such “traditional” beliefs would be “labeled as bigots and treated as such” by the government. So on Tuesday he wrote of his fear that the admonition not to use the Obergefell decision in that way “is not being heeded by our society.”
As one of the high court’s most-aggrieved members, including when it comes to perceived religious persecution, Alito’s latest lament is unsurprising. More concerning from the author of the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade is his dim view of Obergefell itself, which his GOP-appointed colleague Clarence Thomas said in his Dobbs concurrence should be reconsidered.
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