(Ezekiel Loseke, Headline USA) Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, told CNN that he thinks homosexual “marriage” is an issue to be decided on by the states.
“I have respect for South Carolina,” Graham said, according to Axios.
“South Carolina voters, here, I trust to define marriage and to deal with the issue of abortion, not nine people on the court,” he continued. “That’s my view.”
Once deemed controversial, gay marriage has been regarded as settled law since the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges took the decision out of individual states’ jurisdictions.
However, the court’s recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturning the nearly 50-year-old federal abortion mandate established by Roe v. Wade, has opened the door to questions about several other cases in which prior benches undertook their own social engineering via fiat.
While the majority Dobbs opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito, stated emphatically that the court’s ruling would not extend to other landmark cases in the Left’s long march of judicial activism, Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion suggested that any instances of the court overstepping its role might become fair game.
In response to Thomas, House Democrats sought to scaremonger to their base by passing a resolution that would pre-emptively legalize gay marriage at the federal level.
Graham, whose political allegiances are often a source of speculation, signaled that he would not support such a bill if it reached the Senate, regardless of what the court may rule in the future, because doing so would flout the 10th Amendment’s conferring of such power onto state legislatures.
While clarifying that Obergefell still stands, Graham stated that “if you’re going to ask me to have the federal government take over defining marriage, I’m going to say no.”
The 10th Amendment reads that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
