It would be nice to know their reasoning on this so we could feel confident that they’ve decided that marriage equality isn’t on the chopping block, but this is good news nonetheless:
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.
Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling. Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.
Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion.
Barrett has indicated that gay marriage might be an exception because people have come to depend on it when creating families. So that’s nice.
I still would not rest entirely easy on this. A lot depends on what happens in the next few years. If the authoritarian Christian Nationalists solidify their power and they are able to impose their culture war beliefs on the rest of us, this will almost certainly be on the chopping block. For now they’re concentrating on transgender hatred.
Still, it’s good. I’ll take it.