A CNN segment suggesting that Donald Trump’s reelection could lead to the end of gay marriage in the United States warrants an apology from the network, said an opinion piece from the left-leaning media watchdog site Mediaite. The piece noted that host Pamela Brown began a segment earlier this week by declaring that “as Donald Trump is set to return to power, some Americans worried [sic] about the impact of his policies on their lives and the lives of those they love are taking extraordinary steps,” before bringing on a lesbian couple to talk about their decision to get married immediately instead of next year.
Brown continued the conversation by asking them about their “biggest fear.” One partner expressed concern that they might be denied access to each other in the hospital, while the other provided the following explanation to justify these fears: “If we look back to Trump’s last term, we can see actions he took that, you know, now, under his term, people could start making cakes for gay couples for their weddings, and that would be a legal right of theirs. They took trans people out of the military. I think there’s so many things in his actions that we have seen that have been scary in the past. And so, at this point, we’re just trying to be pragmatic and logistical and think about what can we do to protect our own family.”
No blame should be directed at the two guests themselves, the op-ed notes, adding that are not experts and do not claim to be, which explains their inability to accurately distinguish the legal nuances involved in the examples they discussed or their erroneous comparisons to the issue of marriage. However, the op-ed continued, CNN deserves full criticism for featuring them in a segment that misinformed its audience, accompanied by the sensationalist chyron: “TRUMP’S RETURN SPARKS RUSH TO MARRY, HAVE KIDS FOR SOME GAY COUPLES.”
Under Donald Trump’s leadership, the GOP has eliminated language defining marriage as a union between “one man and one woman” from its party platform, a move celebrated by gay conservative leaders such as Charles Moran of the Log Cabin Republicans, the piece continued. “The Republican Party was running constitutional bans on gay marriage in the 2004 presidential election, and now we’re at a place where, 20 years later, the GOP platform is completely caught up with where society is, and quite honestly, a majority of Republicans are, as well, on respecting LGBT equality,” said Moran.
The piece continued:
So there is already little to suggest Trump would have any interest in pursuing a ban on gay marriage. But even if he — or any other state government — did want to pursue such a course, the Supreme Court would first need to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. That’s not going to happen. As evidence for the claim that it might, one of Brown’s guests cited Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which he floated the possibility of revisiting Obergefell. Yet not a single other justice signed on to his concurrence.
Justice Samuel Alito, who is ideologically and temperamentally the second most likely to favor overturning Obergefell, wrote the following in his majority opinion: “Perhaps this is designed to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights, but the dissent’s analogy is objectionable for a more important reason: what it reveals about the dissent’s views on the protection of what Roe called ‘potential life.’ The exercise of the rights at issue in Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell does not destroy a ‘potential life,’ but an abortion has that effect.
Alito then concluded: “Finally, the dissent suggests that our decision calls into question Griswold, Eisenstadt, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Post, at 4–5, 26–27, n. 8. But we have stated unequivocally that ‘[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'” Even without the Court’s originalist bloc explicitly signaling their reluctance to revisit the issue, any reasonably informed observer of its practices would recognize that its respect for stare decisis and consideration of reliance interests would make overturning Obergefell highly unlikely, the op-ed continued.
This leaves two plausible explanations for CNN’s segment: either the network is ignorant of these facts or it is deliberately engaging in fearmongering for financial and/or political gain, the piece said, adding that whether incompetent or intentionally misleading—take your pick—it amounts to journalistic malpractice and is yet another troubling misstep for the “This is an apple” network.
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.