The US Supreme Court rejects a bid by a former Kentucky county official to overturn its landmark 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, as the justices steer clear of the contentious case some 3-1/2 years after its conservative majority reversed abortion rights.
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, turns away an appeal by Kim Davis, the former Rowan County clerk who was sued by a gay couple after refusing to issue any marriage licenses following the 2015 decision that recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Davis has said same-sex marriage conflicts with her religious beliefs as an Apostolic Christian.
Davis appealed after lower courts rejected her claim that the US Constitution’s First Amendment right to free exercise of religion shields her from liability in the case. Davis was ordered to pay more than $360,000 in damages and legal fees for violating the same-sex couple’s right to marry.
The 2015 ruling in the case called Obergefell v. Hodges represented a historic victory for LGBT rights in the United States. It declared that the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law means states cannot ban same-sex marriages.
“The Supreme Court’s denial of review confirms what we already knew: same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and Kim Davis’s denial of marriage licenses in defiance of Obergefell plainly violated that right,” say William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.
“This is a win for same-sex couples everywhere who have built their families and lives around the right to marry,” Powell adds.
A Bit of History:
The 2015 ruling in the case of Obergefell v Hodges was a historic victory for LGBT rights in the US, but some conservatives argue it dealt a blow to religious liberty.
Davis appealed in a civil rights lawsuit by David Ermold and David Moore, a couple who accused her of violating their constitutional right to marry.
“For me, this would be an act of disobedience to God,” she said at the time.
In 2022, federal Judge David Bunning rejected Davis’s argument that her constitutionally guaranteed religious beliefs protected her from liability in the case.
“Davis cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official,” Bunning wrote.
The Rowan County clerk was ultimately ordered to pay $360,000 (£274,000) in damages and served six days in jail for contempt of court.
The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati, Ohio, also ruled against her.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Davis’s legal team argued the same-sex marriage right was grounded in a “legal fiction”.
On Monday, Davis’s lawyer, Mat Staver, of the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel, said his client “now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings”, reports the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper.
The Trump administration had not commented on her case while it waited to see whether the nation’s top legal arbiter would take up the appeal.
Some conservatives had hoped the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, would revisit the issue of same-sex marriage after the justices in 2023 overturned a longstanding right to abortion.
In Obergefell v Hodges, Anthony Kennedy, a since-retired conservative justice, sided with four liberal justices.
Kennedy wrote in the decision 10 years ago that gay people hoping to marry were “not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions”.
“They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Three of the four conservative justices who dissented in that case still serve on the court.
One of them, Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote in his dissent at the time: “Today, five lawyers have ordered every state to change their definition of marriage. Just who do we think we are?”
