Your Right To

LIBERTY

For the first time in this country’s history, the current conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court has taken an American freedom away, overturning 50 years of legal precedent and removing the freedom to choose how and when to bear a child, how and when to start or expand a family. The Court has revoked its own 1972 Roe v. Wade decision that made the abortion procedure legal in all 50 states. More than a third of American women aged 15-44 have already lost access. Twelve Republican-led states have banned abortions outright; about half of the states are expected to pass near-total bans on the process.

This decision is a huge overreach of government interference in Americans’ personal and private lives. It reflects a view held by only about a third of the American people, while 61% say it should be legal in all or most cases. It is the result of years of Republican maneuvering to place ultra-conservative abortion opponents on the Court – and it is an ominous signal of what’s to come. If this Court can remove one freedom, it can remove more. 

• Republicans in YOUR state are working to destroy your right to make this choice yourself or with your loved one – if they haven’t already done so. THIS FALL, DON’T GIVE THEM THAT POWER. Vote to keep them from denying you this basic freedom, now embraced by billions around the world.

Here is what the country looks like now as Republican leaders rewrite personal freedom: 

• A ten-year-old Ohio rape victim was forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion because her pregnancy had passed the legal limit for the procedure in her home state. The doctor who legally performed it came under threat by rightwing vigilantes. WATCH HER STORY.
• Texas’s new law bans all abortions after six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant. It also invites anyone from any state to sue for at least $10,000 any person (a neighbor? a mother? a sister?) who has assisted someone in getting an abortion. The law creates a hideous “gotcha” industry of bounty-hunters around what most Americans consider to be a private health care procedure. Any person in Texas performing an abortion faces life in prison and a $100,000 fine. SEE THAT NEWS STORY.
• A Nebraska mother and daughter are being criminally charged with breaking a state abortion law after Facebook turned their private messages over to state police. SEE THE STORY.

Conservative Republican legislators and judges want to outlaw contraception in America. This is not a drill. This is a right you could easily lose.  

Ultra-conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, encouraged the court to also overturn the landmark 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut. This case ruled that contraception between two married individuals was a matter of privacy, and constitutionally protected. But today’s Court, led by Thomas, fellow ultra-conservative Samuel Alito and three Trump-appointed extreme conservatives, already finds grounds for revoking Griswold v. Connecticut, citing that the Constitution does not include the word “contraception.” This could mean the current Supreme Court takes away another basic American freedom with huge implications in people’s lives, particularly women’s lives.

• The Supreme Court could do that – unless YOU and millions of American voters make sure that Congress can pass national laws protecting your right to contraception. Vote for your Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate and U.S. Representative to make that possible. 

How are Republicans muddling abortion with contraception?

How are Republicans at the state level preparing to ban all forms of contraception?

Today, families across America – in red, blue, and purple states – all seem to include an uncle, a cousin, a sister or a mother or father, who identifies as gay. Thankfully, stigmas have fallen away and our family members are more and more free to be who they are. The U.S. Supreme Court helped enshrine this happy reality in 2015, when in Obergefell v. Hodges, it declared that same-sex marriage cannot be banned in the United States and must be recognized nationwide. A full 70% of Americans now support same-sex marriage, including a majority of Republicans.

But now, Republican lawmakers and judges have this ruling in their sites. In the concurring opinion to the decision this year overturning Roe V. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas invited the court to “revisit and overrule” that 2015 decision. The conservatives on the Supreme Court have the votes to do it. A bill in Congress – the Marriage Equality Act – would stop that from happening by protecting the right to same-sex and interracial marriage before the Supreme Court tries to revoke that right. The Marriage Equality Act passed in the House, but 157 Republican Representatives voted against it.  The Marriage Equality Act has moved on to the Senate, where the vast majority of Republican Senators will also vote against protecting this right that Americans had come to take for granted, likely leaving this crucial issue in the hands of an extraordinarily conservative, activist Supreme Court. 

• Vote for your Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. With a pickup of two Senators, Democrats could waive Senate filibuster rules and pass this law, even over united Republican opposition.

Republicans nationwide and in the Supreme Court want to outlaw this joy and take away these fundamental human rights.

This Republican Congressman voted against the Marriage Equality Act just before welcoming his son’s new same-sex spouse into the family. You literally can’t make this stuff up!

• Three fourths of all Republican Congressmen vote to deny all Americans the right to marry the person they love. WATCH IT HERE.

Republican judges and lawmakers are attempting to create policy that is a serious threat to American civil liberties, reversing years of democratic and humane legislation. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has directed state agencies to investigate families pursuing transgender care for their youth.  Abbott has categorized these services – supporting a young person in their chosen gender – as “child abuse.” Florida Republicans and Governor Ron DeSantis recently enacted the “Parental Rights Education” bill, now commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.  Under this bill Florida public school teachers are restricted from making reference to or teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity.  

These efforts are part of a larger movement among conservative Republicans to dial the U.S. back to an earlier time, when gay and lesbian people were scorned as deviant “others” and laws failed to protect them from hostility and discrimination. Republican-controlled states from Florida are restricting student access to books with LGBTQ themes. This year, more than 300 bills to restrict L.G.B.T.Q. rights have been introduced in 23 states, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

• Stop super-conservative Republican lawmakers from destroying the progress the U.S. has made in recent decades in protecting these Americans’ civil liberties. Listen to what they’re saying! Keep them out of office!

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants his state government to investigate families with trans and LGBTQ children for alleged “child abuse.”