Conservatives call for the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 same-sex marriage ruling
By Bekah McCallum May 8, 2025, at World.
Nearly 10 years after refusing to issue a marriage license to several same-sex couples, a former Kentucky clerk hopes to bring her case before the Supreme Court. Davis spent five days in jail in 2015 for her defiance of a court order and has been ordered to pay more than $360,000 in damages and attorney fees to two men who requested a marriage license. But according to Liberty Counsel, the firm representing Davis, the dispute isn’t just about money. Rather, it presents an opportunity to challenge the redefinition of marriage.
“This case underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Obergefell v. Hodges,” Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver said in a statement late last month.
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, some conservatives have explored the possibility of a reversal in the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. Roe and Obergefell stand on similar legal footing. Some state legislators have championed state resolutions to ask the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 decision. But pinning those hopes on Davis’ case may be a long shot. Even if the justices agreed to hear a case like Davis’—and ruled in her favor—a change in court precedent may not be enough to topple constitutional protection of same-sex marriage, due to public support and a 2022 federal law…
The rise in transgender ideology has likely fueled calls to overturn the ruling.
Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the pro-family nonprofit Ruth Institute, said that defining same-sex marriage as a constitutional privilege paved the way for the transgender movement by “degendering” marriage. “Hello, having children is the most gendered thing that we do,” Morse said. “If you’re going to say that doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter on the sporting field, it doesn’t matter in the bathroom, it doesn’t matter anywhere.”
But Morse doesn’t anticipate the outcry against same-sex marriage at the state level will reach a fever pitch anytime soon. A Gallup poll found that in 2024, only 29% of Americans believed same-sex marriages should not be legally recognized on par with marriage between one man and one woman, down from 37% in 2015.
For a broad enough opposition to same-sex marriage to develop, Morse thinks society needs to understand the purpose of the institution of marriage.
Mainstream culture has reduced sex to a recreational activity. Even heterosexual marriage has become, in Morse’s words, a “government registry of friendship,” leaving more and more young people with broken homes and little incentive to safeguard a definition of marriage: “When you say gay marriage is going to deprive children of one of their parents, they’re like, ‘So what?’ … Because mom’s on her third husband, right?”
