“The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions.” — Justice Samuel Alito.
In keeping with the logic used to strike down Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is also doing away with the following, non-deeply rooted rights.
The right to contraception. Virtually unthinkable when the United States was founded, the right to copulate recreationally—and not specifically to bear children—shall be overturned, unless an influential Republican lawmaker’s mistress needs Plan B.
The right to indoor plumbing. James Madison shat in a pot and so will you.
The right to check your email. The bizarre technology we know as “electronic mail” would have been utterly foreign to the Founding Fathers. (Note: The same goes for the rights to watch Netflix, drive automobiles, eat Funyuns, play electric guitar, and consume any pornography that does not involve detailed etchings of goats.)
The right to buy a machine gun without a background check or anything. The historical jurisprudence around gun ownership shows broad, bipartisan support for meaningful gun control that deviates radically from the far right’s current—just kidding, the court’s not doing jack shit about this.
The right to attend desegregated schools. Okay, so the likeliest outcome here is that the court will continue to whittle away this right without straight-up overturning Brown v. Board of Education. It’s complicated, so let us explain. On the one hand, any constitutional scholar could tell you that Brown was very much not in keeping with the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers, but rather an activist recognition of a previously denied right. On the other hand, none of the conservative justices want to be known as “that prick who overturned Brown.” Not even Gorsuch. Weird, we know.
The right to live in Wisconsin. Sorry, but nowhere in the Constitution does it say the word “Wisconsin,” nor does it reference the cheese hats they wear to signal that it is time to mate, so these rights are now void.
The right to go about wigless. You have to wear a wig now, understand? People were wearing them left and right in the 1700s, so you have to as well. Those are the rules. Do wigs itch? Probably. Do they look good? No. Are they expensive to maintain? Almost certainly. But John Adams wore one, so here we are. (You should probably also get smallpox or fleas or something, just to be safe.)
The right to same-sex marriage. You better believe they’re coming for this one—less because of a strict constructionist philosophy, and more because the conservative justices have always wanted to live in Saudi Arabia without the hassle of moving there, y’know?
The right to dance to “Hey Ya!” at your cousin’s wedding. Article IV of the Constitution clearly states that Outkast’s 2003 mega-hit is wholly inferior to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk,” while the landmark Supreme Court case Kevin’s Drunk Best Man v. The DJ Kevin Hired (2009) held, five to four, that it’s also worse than “Mr. Brightside,” depending on the night’s vibe.
The right to live a happy, dignified life in which you’re secure in your bodily autonomy, where you can make your own decisions about your health and well-being without interference from an unelected judicial body that quotes—literally quotes—a dude from the 1600s who sentenced women to death for, we shit you not, fucking witchcraft. Yep, gone.