First Lady: Kagan, Sotomayor Will Protect Right to ‘Love Whomever We Choose’

Accompanied by student worker Jeremy Jackson and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, First Lady Michelle Obama holds a worm at the Iron Street Urban Farm in Chicago, Ill., on Oct. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

(CNSNews.com) - First Lady Michelle Obama told two audiences at Democratic fundraising events on Tuesday that the justices her husband appointed to the Supreme Court will protect the right to “love whomever we choose.”

She also said these justices would protect “privacy”—presumably a reference to the “right to privacy” the court invoked in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States.

“Let’s not forget what it meant when my husband appointed those two brilliant Supreme Court justices, and for the first time in history our daughters and our sons watched three women take their seat on our nation’s highest court,” Mrs. Obama said to applause at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at Plumbers Hall in Chicago.

“But more importantly,” she said, “let us never forget the impact their decisions will have on our lives for decades to come--on our privacy and our security, on whether we can speak freely, worship openly, and, yes, love whomever we choose. That is what’s at stake here.”

President Barack Obama has nominated two Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They joined Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, making a total of three women on the nine-member court.

At a DNC event at the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel in Detroit on Tuesday, Mrs. Obama repeated—virtually verbatim—the same remarks she made about her husband’s Supreme Court nominees in her speech in Chicago.