U.S. Supreme Court docket
As soon as-jailed county clerk asks Supreme Court docket to overturn proper to same-sex marriage
August 13, 2025, 12:08 pm CDT
Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk Kim Davis on the Rowan County Courthouse in September 2015 in Morehead, Kentucky. (Picture by Ty Wright/Getty Photographs)
A county clerk in Kentucky who refused to concern marriage licenses to same-sex {couples} is asking the U.S. Supreme Court docket to overturn its 2015 resolution discovering that same-sex marriage is a constitutional proper.
Former clerk Kim Davis is asking the Supreme Court docket to overrule Obergefell v. Hodges and to rule that the First Modification’s free train clause protects her from tort legal responsibility for her religious-based refusals to grant the licenses.
Obergefell was a “flawed opinion” and “egregiously improper,” say attorneys for Davis with the conservative Christian authorized group Liberty Counsel within the cert petition filed final month.
ABC Information, the Washington Blade, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Impartial and the Related Press are among the many publications with protection.
Davis was jailed for contempt in 2015 after she refused to concern marriage licenses, however she was launched after six days when court docket workers issued the licenses. She was sued by same-sex {couples} she turned away and ordered to pay $100,000 to 2 plaintiffs for emotional misery, in addition to $260,000 in lawyer charges.
Obergefell held that the precise to same-sex marriage is protected by the due course of and equal safety clauses of the 14th Modification. Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion was joined by the excessive court docket’s 4 liberal justices, which on the time included Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer.
Ginsburg has since died, and Kennedy and Breyer have retired. Kennedy and Ginsburg had been changed by appointees of President Donald Trump—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Breyer was changed by an appointee of former President Joe Biden—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Obergefell was grounded within the “misguided fiction” of substantive due course of that prohibits authorities infringement of sure elementary liberty pursuits, the cert petition says.
Davis’ attorneys argue that the due course of clause at most protects course of, not substantive rights. The argument was made by Justice Clarence Thomas in a concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group, a 2022 resolution that overturned the constitutional proper to abortion.
If the Supreme Court docket doesn’t remove substantive due course of, the cert petition says, Obergefell must be overturned as a result of the precise to same-sex marriage is “neither fastidiously described nor deeply rooted within the nation’s historical past.”
“If ever there was a case of remarkable significance,” the cert petition says, “the primary particular person within the republic’s historical past who was jailed for following her non secular convictions relating to the historic definition of marriage, this must be it.”
The Supreme Court docket will think about whether or not to grant cert this fall.
The case is in Davis v. Ermold.
See additionally:
Defiant county clerk refuses to concern marriage licenses regardless of SCOTUS motion
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