Skip to content Skip to footer

Alito Attacks Marriage Equality, COVID Orders, and Reproductive Rights in Speech

Alito’s rant contained lies about contraception and a seeming attempt to invent a legal right not to be called bigoted.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is seen in the Oval Office of the White House on July 23, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered an impassioned and alarming speech on Thursday evening that touched on a number of hot-button political issues — an unusual move from a Supreme Court justice that provoked sharp rebukes from a number of legal experts.

The justice’s words, delivered virtually as a keynote speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, made suspect warnings over encroachments on individual liberty in the United States. Alito criticized Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality, for example, and discussed his concerns over restrictions being issued by state governments in order to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020,” Alito said.

While claiming to be a “judge, not a policymaker,” Alito said his words should not be “twisted or misunderstood.” Yet the associate justice’s speech was brazenly political.

On COVID-19, Alito decried “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty,” describing the crisis as a “sort of constitutional stress test.”

The U.S. response to the pandemic, including governors’ emergency orders that have regulated some aspects of regular life, “has highlighted disturbing trends that were already in evidence before the pandemic struck,” Alito asserted.

The justice described such orders as the “dominance of lawmaking by executive fiat.”

Alito expressed misgivings at rulings the Supreme Court had made earlier this year allowing governors to impose restrictions on churches. Religious freedom, he insinuated in his remarks, is under attack.

“For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It’s often just an excuse for bigotry and can’t be tolerated, even when there is no evidence that anybody has been harmed,” he said.

“The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs,” Alito added.

Continuing on the subject of religion, Alito appeared to lament the fact that society is shifting toward acceptance of marriage equality and other LGBTQ rights. He criticized the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court ruling, which recognized the legality of same-sex marriage across the entirety of the United States.

In making that ruling, Alito argued, the Supreme Court had caused those who say only heterosexual marriage should exist to be viewed negatively or even be punished by employers, schools, or other entities for expressing those views. Even though “the vast majority of Americans” defined marriage in heterosexist terms “until very recently, he complained, “Now, it’s considered bigotry.”

Alito also complained about the inability of religious bigots to express their views openly without consequence, describing it as a free speech issue as well as one of religious tolerance.

Others quickly pushed back against the idea that freedom of worship ought to protect people from being criticized for bigotry.

“There’s no constitutional right that protects a person from being called a bigot when the person is a bigot,” former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob wrote in a tweet. “Alito is a radical who wants his religion to control your life.”

CNN commentator Keith Boykin also noted that the associate justice was hypocritical in trying to protect “unpopular religious beliefs.”

“This from the same Supreme Court Justice Alito who voted to uphold Trump’s Muslim ban in the 2018 case, Trump v. Hawaii,” Boykin said.

Alito also spoke critically in his speech of reproductive rights, targeting Washington State specifically for requiring all pharmacies to stock the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B. To justify his opposition to the Washington State policy, the justice incorrectly asserted that the drug “destroys an embryo after fertilization.”

“Plan B doesn’t do that,” OB/GYN Leah Torres said on Twitter. “It can’t do that.”

“Alito is not a doctor,” Torres added, noting his extreme ignorance on the issue.

Others decried Alito’s decision to deliver his extraordinarily partisan speech while serving as a sitting justice of the nation’s highest court.

“This speech is like I woke up from a vampire dream. Unscrupulously biased, political, and even angry,” former federal prosecutor and University of Baltimore law professor Kim Wehle said. “I can’t imagine why Alito did this publicly. Totally inappropriate and damaging to the Supreme Court.”

“Alito’s speech is actually making the best argument for Court reform,” said Dan Epps, associate professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis. “There’s just no good justification for a system that gives an angry partisan like this a veto on legislation.”

Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn

Dear Truthout Community,

If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.

We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.

Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.

There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.

After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?

It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.

We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.

We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.

Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We’re presently working to find 1500 new monthly donors to Truthout before the end of the year.

We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.

With love, rage, and solidarity,

Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy