Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council appeared on “Sandy Rios In The Morning” on Wednesday to discuss the future of LGBT rights under the Trump administration.
Sprigg told Rios, the American Family Association’s director of governmental affairs, that it’s not “at all unrealistic” to believe that the Supreme Court could overturn its landmark marriage equality decision and Roe v. Wade after Donald Trump appoints more conservative justices to the bench.
“I think if we were to get a strong conservative on the court for Justice Scalia’s position and then if one of the more liberal members of the court were also to step down and be replaced by a strong, originalist, constitutionalist justice, I don’t think it’s at all unrealistic,” he said. “And I would point out that people that say that Roe v. Wade is not settled law, but think that even though it’s 43, 44 years old—and Obergefell v. Hodges with the same-sex marriage decision a year and a half ago is settled law—that doesn’t make any sense. Neither of them is settled law because neither of them is rooted in the text of the Constitution of the United States. So no, I don’t think it’s unrealistic.”
Rios agreed and implored her listeners to “get involved” and “get to work” when it comes to pressuring elected officials and the Supreme Court to follow “God’s standard.”
“We can do this!” she said. “I think we’ve done it on abortion—we’ve come a long way on that— now we need to roll up our sleeves and use this issue as a way of evangelizing people to a better way. God has a more excellent way in terms of our behavior sexually and it brings abundant life, and I think that’s the message that we need to be bringing now in order to make it possible for the Supreme Court to turn that back.”
Trump, for his part, said last month that the one-year-old Obergefell ruling is “settled,” but that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is not. In February, he said he would appoint justices who would “unpass” Roe v. Wade and criticized Obergefell as “shocking.”
Sprigg’s FRC colleague, Ken Blackwell, is responsible for handling domestic issues for Trump’s transition team.
