Gay actor Billy Eichner angrily attacked the Supreme Court and conservative Justice Clarence Thomas as “homophobes” who are stuck in the past, during an appearance at the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) on Aug. 28.
The actor didn’t offer any evidence that the justices are hostile to gays or their rights.
“And we support LGBTQ people, and we are not letting them drag us into the last century, because they are in the past and ‘Bros’ is in the future,” Eichner said.
He didn’t explain why he thought Thomas and the justices were homophobic, but left-wing activists have lashed out at Thomas for what he wrote in the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that overturned abortion precedent Roe v. Wade. In a concurring opinion, Thomas reiterated his long-held view that the court should revisit all “demonstrably erroneous” court rulings.
“Get your fictional hateful Bible stories and your fake fictional religious [expletive] out of our [expletive] lives,” he wrote in all capital letters.
In his statement, Thomas wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” including Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and Lawrence v. Texas (2003). Obergefell held that same-sex couples had the constitutional right to marry. Griswold held that married couples had a constitutional right to purchase and use contraceptives without government interference. Lawrence held that criminal laws punishing sodomy were unconstitutional.
Thomas has long believed that the court shouldn’t adhere to substantive due process, which is the legal doctrine that rights deeply rooted in history and tradition, such as personal and relational rights, should be protected by the Fifth and 14th Amendments, even if they aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. The other five conservatives on the nine-member high court didn’t echo Thomas’s remarks in the Dobbs ruling.
Eichner’s comments also ignored the fact that the Supreme Court has embraced positions promoted by LGBT activists in recent years.
In addition to 2015’s Obergefell, the 5–4 ruling that held that the 14th Amendment requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriage, the court held 6–3 in 2020 in Bostock v. Clayton County that employees can’t be fired from their jobs because of sexual orientation or gender identity. The opinion was authored by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Graham’s comments came after H.R. 8404, the proposed Respect for Marriage Act, was approved on July 19 by the House of Representatives in a 267–157 vote, with the backing of 47 Republicans. The legislation is pending in the 50–50 Senate, where it’s expected to have the support of Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).
The legislation would formally repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law that defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman and allowed states to refuse to accept same-sex marriages recognized under other states’ laws. After then-President Bill Clinton signed DOMA, about 40 states banned same-sex marriage. In Obergefell, the Supreme Court found that DOMA was unconstitutional.
