(LifeSiteNews) — A team of conservative attorneys is making another attempt to force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its 2015 decision to force same-sex “marriage” on the country, starting with a brief to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of former Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis.
After the Supreme Court’s controversial Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that forced all 50 states to recognize unions between members of the same sex as marriages, Davis declared that she would cease issuing marriage licenses, arguing that her required signature on the documents would constitute a personal endorsement of homosexual unions that violated her Christian beliefs.
Her resistance to the new normal has persisted for years despite public pressure from lawsuits, judges, and politicians alike. Last year, she was ordered to pay $100,000 to a same-sex couple to whom she refused to issue a marriage license on top of damages awarded to other plaintiffs. The nonprofit Liberty Counsel vowed to appeal on her behalf.
This May, Liberty Counsel filed its notice of appeal with the Sixth Circuit, arguing Davis was not liable for damages to anyone and touting the case’s “potential to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and extend the same religious freedom protections beyond Kentucky to the entire nation,” calling the move the beginning of a “march to the Supreme Court.”
On July 29, Liberty Counsel shared that it had filed the brief itself the previous Monday, a move that had caught the indignant notice of far-left publications such as Jezebel and LGBTQ Nation, and which the group said U.S. Vice President and presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris has begun incorporating into her speeches.
“The uproar since then has been staggering,” Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said. “Once again, our offices are being flooded with hateful threats. And my wife, Anita, president of Liberty Counsel Ministries, has received a direct threat. But we will not falter!”
“Our argument is straightforward: Obergefell should be overturned for the same reasons articulated by the Court in the Dobbs decision that overturned abortion,” Staver contended. “As with Roe v. Wade, the activist High Court at the time was wrong when Roe was decided and it is wrong today because it was based entirely on the ‘legal fiction’ of ‘substantive’ due process, which lacks any basis in the Constitution.”
As a practical matter, overturning Obergefell would not change the status quo for marriage. Ever since President Joe Biden signed the so-called Respect for Marriage Act in December 2023, federal law codifies Obergefell’s denial of states’ ability to recognize only male-female unions as marriage. But reversing the 2015 precedent would clear the way for states to set their own marriage laws again if the RMA is ever repealed.
Three of the current sitting justices dissented from Obergefell: Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. 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 their views of precedent and mixed records on cases important to conservatives.
The news follows the Republican Party earlier this month removing from its party platform language declaring that “Traditional marriage and family, based on marriage between one man and one woman, is the foundation for a free society” and call for that understanding to be reflected in law, including with the “reversal” of Obergefell as judicial activism.