(Bloomberg) -- Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a pioneer in the US fight for marriage equality, warned that same-sex couples may be next to lose rights after the nation’s top court overturned the landmark Roe V. Wade decision.

Nessel, Michigan’s first openly gay statewide office holder and a key player in the US Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, said Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Friday’s anti-Roe decision presents “an invitation” to opponents of marriage equality. She also said the court has devolved into a “partisan tool.” 

“It’s going to do even more damage to the United States Supreme Court. Nobody is going to respect their rulings,” Nessel, a Democrat, told reporters after speaking on the steps of the state capitol in Lansing at a Pride rally Sunday. “I don’t know that people respect their rulings right now because everyone sees it as being so hyper-political. And there was a time that the United States Supreme Court was just not viewed as simply a partisan tool.”

As a private attorney in 2014, Nessel successfully argued before the state supreme court that a law banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. That case, DeBoer v. Snyder, was eventually combined with others and appealed to the US Supreme Court as Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

 

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