BOISE (LifeSiteNews) — Idaho Republican state Rep. Tony Wisniewski has revived an attempt to have the state officially request that the U.S. Supreme Court reverse its notorious 2015 precedent in Obergefell v. Hodges, which forced all 50 states to recognize homosexual unions as “marriages.”
The Idaho Capital Sun reports that the lawmaker introduced the joint memorial on Monday, saying that the “government did not create families or marriage, but they have to recognize that the family is the fundamental building block of society. The strengths [of] these two complementary natures of a father and a mother give strength, direction and stability to the family and therefore to society as a whole.”
The House State Affairs Committee approved introduction of the measure, setting the stage for a later committee hearing. A similar effort passed the state House last year, but died in the Senate.
Undoing Obergefell has long been a goal of social conservatives and constitutional textualists and originalists, but remains an uphill battle.
Three of the current sitting justices — Chief Justice John Roberts and conservatives Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented from Obergefell. The latter two are considered reliable votes to overturn if the chance arises, given statements both have made in the years since. But it is less certain how Roberts and the Court’s three more recent Republican appointees would rule, given past statements about deferring to precedent and their mixed records on cases important to conservatives. Last November, the Court declined to hear a case from former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis that could have reconsidered Obergefell.
Further, as a practical matter, even if the Supreme Court reversed Obergefell, recognition of same-sex “marriage” would still be mandatory nationwide, thanks to former President Joe Biden signing the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” in 2023.
Thirty-two states still have duly-enacted same-sex “marriage” bans on the books, according to World Population Review (which lists 33, but as of this writing still has not been updated to reflect Colorado’s April 2025 repeal of its unenforced ban), all of which have been blocked from enforcement since Obergefell. Only 18 states plus the District of Columbia have no ban in place.
At least half a dozen states have adopted resolutions urging the nation’s highest court to reverse Obergefell. They have no legal force nor can they begin any legal battle that could eventually put the issue back before the nation’s highest court, but they raise awareness of an issue that, while long since declared “settled” by the establishments of both parties, remains a serious affront to biblical morality and set the stage for today’s battles over transgenderism, surrogacy, and religious freedom.
As LifeSiteNews’s Doug Mainwaring wrote last month, a “massive coalition of conservative leaders and organizations has now banded together under the banner of ‘Greater Than,’ a not-so-thinly veiled swipe at the chief proponent of homosexual ‘marriage,’ the LGBTQ+ Washington powerhouse lobbying organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), whose logo is an equal sign. The message is clear: Children’s rights must be greater than those of adults. It’s hard to imagine anyone not getting behind this movement.”
