In remarks to a Democratic National Committee fundraiser, President Joe Biden took aim at an “extreme” Republican Party shaped by Donald Trump and state-level threats to abortion rights and protections for LGBT+ Americans.
“Did you ever think we’d be in a position in the year 2022 – we’d be talking about banning books in schools?” the president said on 11 May, referring to a growing campaign from conservative activists and Republican legislators to restrict speech in schools, including “bans” on certain books in libraries.
He referenced Florida Republicans’ attempts to dismantlethe Walt Disney Company’s governing structure for its sprawling theme park campus after the company opposed what critics have called a “Don’t Say Gay” law that prohibits classroom discussion of LGBT+ people, events and issues.
“I mean, you know, the idea that you cannot mention – you cannot mention to the school. What’s going to happen to a gay child, an L[G]BTQ child in school?” he said. “I mean, this thing – it’s one thing to take on Disney World. They’re going to storm Cinderella’s castle before this is over.”
In his remarks, the president pressed the urgency of several issues – protections for civil rights, voting rights, Social Security, healthcare – as part of Democrats’ critical midterm elections platform, as Republicans prepare to win control of Congress and deadlock Mr Biden’s agenda.
“We got a lot of work to do,” he said. “I think we can pick up three Senate seats. And I think we can increase our majority in the House, but we have to do it by more than just a couple of votes. We have to do it by more than a couple of votes, because it’s getting much too close.”
The president also warned that a leaked draft opinion from the US Supreme Court signalling the end of constitutional protections for abortion, affirmed by the landmark ruling in 1973’s Roe v Wade, could embolden Republicans to “go after” marriage equality.
The US Senate failed to pass legislation on Wednesday that would codift Roe protections into law. Roughly 26 states are set to quickly or immediately make abortion illegal without Roe in place.
“It’s not only the brutality of taking away a woman’s right to control her own body and all the damage that does physically, psychologically, practically,” the president said.
He said the opinion “basically says there is no such thing as a right to privacy,” essential 14th Amendment protections affirmed in the Roe decision.
“Mark my words: If that decision holds, it’s not only we’re going to be fighting for a woman’s right to control her own body and the brutality that goes along with having to give birth in a circumstance that is something beyond what – that can be tolerated, but what else is going to happen?” he said. “Mark my words: They’re going to go after the right of the – Supreme Court decision on the right of same-sex marriage.”
He also suggested the court could hear challenges to Griswold v Connecticut, a 1965 ruling that established the right to use birth control as part of a ruling that established that marital privacy is protected against bans on contraceptives.
