President Biden called for challenges to state laws “targeting transgender children” while signing the Respect for Marriage Act into law on Tuesday.
“We need to challenge the hundreds of callous, cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need,” Biden said during the signing event on the South Lawn of the White House.
The Florida Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted last month to ban puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery as treatments for transgender minors in the state. Florida is also one of at least nine states that prohibits Medicaid coverage of gender-transition services.
“The chief point of agreement among all of the experts — and I must emphasize this — is that there is a pressing need for additional, high-quality clinical research,” said the board of medicine’s chair, Dr. David A. Diamond, a radiation oncologist.
The Tuesday signing ceremony was attended by lawmakers, members of the president’s cabinet and LGBT activists, including a pair of drag queens.
“To be a non binary drag artist invited to the White House is something I never imagined would happen,” Marti Cummings tweeted about the ceremony invite. “Thank you President & Dr. Biden for inviting me to this historic bill signing. Grateful doesn’t begin to express the emotions I feel.”
Biden on Tuesday said racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and transphobia are “all connected” and suggested “the antidote to hate is love.”
“This law and the love defense strike a blow against hate in all its forms,” Biden said.
“For most of our nation’s history, we denied interracial couples and same-sex couples from these protections. We failed. We failed to treat them with equal dignity and respect. And now law requires interracial marriage. And same-sex marriage must be recognized as legal in every state in the nation,” the president said.
The signing comes after the measure passed the House in a 258-169 vote and the Senate in a 61-36 vote.
Democrats have said the bill is necessary after conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization earlier this year that the Court “should reconsider” its decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a right to contraception, privacy in the bedroom, and same-sex marriage, respectively.
Thomas’s reasoning was that the Court’s majority found that a right to abortion was not a form of “liberty” protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. He said the Court therefore had a duty to “correct the error” in the other three precedents, which relied upon the same legal reasoning as Roe. He wrote that after “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions” protected the rights established in the three cases.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs that the ruling does not affect issues other than abortion.
While the bill ultimately included an amendment crafted by Senators Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Tammy Baldwin (D., Wis.) in an effort to assuage Republican concerns about religious liberty, Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) has said the current religious-liberty protections in the bill were “severely anemic and largely illusory” and said the new amendment is “insufficient.”