https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kentucky-clerk-kim-davis-gay-marriage-supreme-court_n_690cf7bee4b027afb322b9f7?origin=home-whats-happening-unit
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Remember Kim Davis, the 4 timed married, 3 time divorced "biblical marriage" pretender who claimed to be representing God's authority to deny other people the right to marry? Well, she's baaaaaaaaack...
The Supreme Court justices on Friday will meet for a closed-door meeting to consider whether to take up a case that asks them to upend the court’s landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage a decade ago.
Kim Davis, who has been divorced three times and married four, has become one of the nation’s most steadfast defenders of “biblical marriage.”
Davis spent five days in jail after the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality because she refused to issue marriage licenses as part of her role as county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky. Citing her Christian beliefs, Davis told one same-sex couple, David Ermold and David Moore, that she was acting “under God’s authority” and that they could get married in a different county. The couple quickly sued Davis, though it wasn’t until 2023 that a jury determined she needed to award $100,000 in damages to Moore and Ermold, as well as pay $260,000 in attorney’s fees.
Davis appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, arguing that she couldn’t be liable because issuing a license to a gay couple would have violated her right to practice her religion. She lost her appeal in March.
So in July, she filed a petition to the Supreme Court, which she had done once before. She argued the free exercise of religion clause in the First Amendment shields her from being personally liable for the denial of marriage licenses.
More importantly, Davis’ petition claims that the court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples were entitled to the fundamental right to marry under the 14th Amendment, was “egregiously wrong” and should be overturned.
SCOTUS Blog first broke the news of the closed-door meeting in October. These private conferences among the justices occur on Wednesdays and Fridays during a given Supreme Court term, and are used as time to freely discuss remaining cases and decide whether to accept a case for review.
If at least four justices vote to grant Davis’ petition, according to the court’s “Rule of Four,” the court will accept a full review of her case, and Davis’ lawyers could one day raise the argument for overturning Obergefell directly to the justices during oral arguments.
There is reason to believe that at least two justices within the top court’s 6-3 conservative majority would vote in favor of granting Davis’ petition.
After the court denied Davis’ first petition in 2020, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito wrote a statement signaling they may be open to gutting Obergefell, which they said had “ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”
“Davis may have been one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last,” Thomas and Alito wrote. Both justices dissented in the Obergefell decision.
In Thomas’ concurring opinion overturning Roe v. Wade three years ago, he wrote that the Supreme Court should reconsider opinions not only in Obergefell but also for protections related to same-sex relationships and access to contraceptives.
Last month, while speaking at an academic conference in Washington, Alito said he does not suggest that Obergefell should be overruled. Instead, he said the outcome in Obergefell “is a precedent of the court that is entitled to the respect afforded by the doctrine of stare decisis.”
Plainly, Alito is referring to the legal principle that requires the court to follow precedent, meaning that it follows the decisions and rulings of past cases. In the thousands of rulings over the Supreme Court’s history, it has only broken with stare decisis 145 times, including most famously when it overturned Roe v. Wade and upended the federal right to abortion in 2022.
It is uncertain where Davis’ case will go after the private meeting among the justices, but the next steps will likely be made public in the coming days. The justices could immediately deny the case, which could be announced as early as Monday ― otherwise, it could go through a second private review.
Lawyers for Ermold and Moore argue that Davis’ case is a “poor vehicle” to try to overrule Obergefell, especially since throughout the 6th Circuit case and her previous Supreme Court petition, Davis expressed that she didn’t want to relitigate the decision.
If the Supreme Court does choose to take up Davis’ case to revisit Obergefell, however, civil rights lawyers caution that could be cause for serious concern.
“If they take it, it’s because they’re going to overturn it,” Dan Canon, one of the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs in Obergefell and now an assistant professor at the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law, said during a forum on campus.
Moore and Ermold originally declined to respond to Davis’ petition, but the court has since required them to do so. Supreme Court procedures say that only one justice needs to vote to compel a defendant to produce a response.
This move by an unknown justice is concerning to Canon.
“The only reason you would ask somebody to respond is because you think there might be something [they] need to respond to, for whatever reason,” Canon said at the forum.
If Obergefell were to be reversed, states would individually determine the legality of same-sex marriage ― similar to the current landscape for accessing abortion. More than two dozen states now have constitutional amendments or definitions to protect same-sex couples’ ability to marry.
“If Obergefell is overturned, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get married and it doesn’t mean that you will become unmarried if you are currently married,” Andy Izenson, the senior legal director at the Chosen Family Law Center, told HuffPost last fall. “What it does mean is that states that don’t want to recognize out of state same-sex marriages or grant new ones will then be able to do that.”
Last year, voters in California, Hawaii and Colorado passed ballot initiatives to repeal language in their state constitutions that defined marriage as solely between one man and one woman.
But as voters in blue states sought to codify protections for LGBTQ+ people to brace for a second Donald Trump presidency last year, now some conservative lawmakers are targeting marriage equality in state legislatures across the country.
In January, the Idaho House passed a resolution to call on the Supreme Court to reconsider the Obergefell decision. Then, in late October, Texas’ Supreme Court added a comment to the state judicial code that Texas judges who refuse to perform wedding ceremonies based on “sincerely held religious belief” do not violate the state’s judicial conduct code. The court’s comment could have implications for same-sex marriage across the state, and may play a role in Davis’ current effort to overturn gay marriage.
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We remain committed to providing you with the unflinching, fact-based journalism everyone deserves.
Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
Davis’ lawyer, Mathew Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, an evangelical Christian ministry, on Wednesday filed a supplemental brief citing the Texas Supreme Court’s comment and arguing that the highest court must resolve the “disagreement about the interaction between Obergefell and the First Amendment.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated Liberty Counsel as a “hate group.” A few months before the Obergefell ruling in 2015, Staver said he would refuse to “accept that as the rule of law” — just as, he said, he would have refused to obey a government order to turn over a Jewish person to the Nazis.
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