WATERTOWN, Wisconsin — Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) flatly opposes existing legislation codifying same-sex marriage and predicts the bill will fail to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle for passage on the Senate floor if introduced for consideration after the midterm elections.
“There’s no need for this legislation. It’s completely unnecessary. This is the Left opening up a wound that I would argue doesn’t need to be opened up,” Johnson said Friday. “But I said: ‘If we’re going to consider this, at a minimum, before I could even consider something like that, I would need to see extremely strong religious liberty protections attached to it.’”
“That discussion of very strong protections for religious liberty,” Johnson added, “is something that I think would be too high a hurdle for — in order to get 60 votes.”
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Johnson commented on the Respect for Marriage Act during a Q&A with college students at Maranatha Baptist University in Watertown, a rural community 50 miles west of Milwaukee, as he campaigns for reelection against Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, his Democratic challenger whom he is scheduled to debate Friday evening. Johnson had initially suggested he would vote for the bill but later said he was opposed because of concerns it encroached on religious liberty.
“That kind of put them on their back heels because they thought they just might have my vote and they realized they don’t,” the senator said.
Notably, Wisconsin’s other senator, Democrat Tammy Baldwin, who is gay, is leading the whip effort to assemble 60 votes and send the House-passed legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Despite being against the Respect for Marriage Act in its current form (48 House Republicans voted for the bill), Johnson emphasized he would oppose legal efforts to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that determined same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. The senator supported Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision eliminating federal protections for abortion rights, but said the rulings are starkly different.
Obergefell, Johnson said, “is completely different” than Dobbs, “which is proactively protecting life.” In other words, whereas overturning Roe v. Wade prevented abortions from occurring in the first place, overturning Obergefell would be socially disruptive, upending existing marriages and families that actively depend on the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling. “I don’t really want to see those people’s lives disrupted,” Johnson said.
Polls show that a majority of people support same-sex marriage, and many gay and lesbian couples worry that in the wake of Roe being overturned 50 years after it was handed down, Obergefell could be next.
Johnson conceded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “opened up that can of worms” when he wrote in a concurring opinion to the Dobbs decision that Obergefell was wrongly decided and should face legal challenges similar to that which led to the overturning of Roe.
But the senator said he is confident same-sex couples’ constitutional right to marry is adequately protected without congressional legislation to back up Obergefell. Perhaps bolstering his position, the other conservative Supreme Court justices who supported Dobbs vehemently disagreed with Thomas’s concurring opinion.
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“I see no scenario, none, in which that Supreme Court decision will ever be overturned,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said he plans to bring the Respect for Marriage Act to the floor for a vote after the midterm elections. So far, roughly a handful of Senate Republicans have said they support the bill, and Baldwin has said she is optimistic there are five more GOP votes in the offing. All 50 Democrats back the legislation.
