A petition before the U.S. Supreme Court is asking the justices to consider overturning the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in light of religious liberty concerns and a recent ruling reversing decades-old U.S. policy on abortion.
The Christian conservative legal group Liberty Counsel announced Thursday it filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Kim Davis, the former county clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky.
Davis, 59, has faced nearly a decade of litigation over her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses following the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision that overturned state bans on same-sex marriage.
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As a Christian, Davis claimed that issuing same-sex marriage licenses is a violation of her deeply held religious belief that marriage constitutes a union between a man and a woman. While Kentucky had a voter-approved constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in place in 2015, the Obergefell decision effectively overturned the ban.
Davis sought a religious accommodation for her beliefs. She spent six days in jail after being held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Davis’ petition asks the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the landmark ruling in Obergefell and review a decision from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding a lower court decision ordering Davis to pay $100,000 in emotional damages to a same-sex couple she refused to grant a marriage license and $260,000 in attorneys’ fees.
“Kim Davis’ case underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn the wrongly decided Obergefell v. Hodges opinion because it threatens the religious liberty of Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman,” Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a statement.
“A person cannot stand before the court utterly defenseless while facing claims of emotional distress for her views on marriage,” he added. “Yet, that is the result of Obergefell, which led these courts to strip Davis of any personal First Amendment defense. Obergefell cannot just push the First Amendment aside to punish individuals for their beliefs about marriage.”
Staver contends that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects public servants from being forced to choose between their faith and their livelihood.
“The High Court now has the opportunity to finally overturn this egregious opinion from 2015,” Staver added.
In a concurring opinion in the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that the court should “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents.” He believes that “the doctrine of substantive due process was used to insist that the U.S. Constitution contained a right to abortion.”
At the same time, Thomas stressed that “[n]othing in [the court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” He indicated an openness to considering “whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”
The makeup of the court has changed since 2015, when the 5-4 Obergefell decision was handed down. Only five of the nine justices who served on the bench at the time still sit on the court today: Democrat-appointed Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who formed part of the majority, and Republican-appointed Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts and Thomas, who dissented.
The late Republican-appointed Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered a scathing dissent in Obergefell, was replaced by Republican-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the lone Republican-appointed justice to support legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, was replaced by fellow Republican appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
The late Democrat-appointed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of the Obergefell majority, was replaced by Republican-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. Democrat-appointed Justice Stephen Breyer, also part of the Obergefell majority, was replaced by Democrat-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022 after his retirement.
Even if the court were to reverse the Obergefell ruling, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress passed legislation codifying Obergefell into law in 2022, which then-President Joe Biden signed.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
