Here is what I want LGBTQ+ Illinoisans to understand.

What the Supreme Court did yesterday affects us. It affects all of us.

Why is Equality Illinois telling you about a voting rights case out of Louisiana? The answer is simple. We do not exist in a vacuum. What the Supreme Court does in Washington D.C. reaches every state, every ballot, every community. A ruling that weakens the vote in Louisiana weakens the vote in Cairo, in Peoria, in Chicago. A Court willing to dismantle the Voting Rights Act is a Court willing to come for the rest.

The same legal logic that gutted the Voting Rights Act yesterday is the logic that will come for marriage equality tomorrow. The same Court. The same coalition. The same playbook.

Yesterday, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court completed what Justice Elena Kagan called the "now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act."

She wrote that the Voting Rights Act "was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers." She wrote that only the people's representatives in Congress have the right to say it is no longer needed. Not the members of the Court.

Justice Kagan dissented.

Equality Illinois dissents with her.

When the protections of one community are dismantled, the protections of every community grow thinner. That is not speculation. That is the pattern.

We dissent from a ruling that makes it harder for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice.

We dissent from a ruling that hands politicians the power to draw our communities into silence.

We dissent from the idea that a 6-3 majority gets to decide that the blood spilled in Selma was spilled for a law we no longer need.

We dissent from any future ruling that uses today's logic to come for marriage, for trans lives, for the right of any of us to exist fully under the law.

The Voting Rights Act was not a gift. It was a debt paid in flesh. No Court has the moral standing to declare that debt settled.

And no Court will tell us to sit down.

From Bronzeville to Bloomington, from Chicago to Cairo, we will register voters, build civic power, and protect the ballot in every community this ruling was designed to weaken. We will stand with the racial justice and voting rights organizations who carried this fight long before today and will carry it long after. Their fight is our fight. It always has been.

The Court has spoken. So have we.

I dissent.

Equality Illinois dissents.

Illinois dissents.

The work continues.