Ten years after the Supreme Court extended the rights of marriage to same -sex couples throughout the country, the judges this fall will consider for the first time if they take A case That explicitly asks them to cancel that decision.
Kim Davis, the former Kentucky County Secretary who was imprisoned for six days in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple for religious reasons, is appealing a jury verdict of $ 100,000 for emotional damage plus $ 260,000 for lawyer fees.
In request For the writing of Certioari presented last month, Davis argues the protection of the first amendment for the free exercise of religion The immunizer of personal responsibility for the denial of marriage licenses.
More fundamentally, she states that the decision of the Superior Court in Obergefell V Hodges, extending marriage rights for same -sex couples under the protections of due process of amendment 14, was “atrociously incorrect.”
“The error must be corrected,” wrote Davis’s lawyer, Mathew Stover, in the petition. He calls Judge Anthony Kennedy Majority opinion In Oberfell “Legal fiction”.
The petition seems to mark the first time since 2015 that the Court has been formally asked to revoke the historical marriage decision. Davis is seen as one of the only Americans currently with legal position to bring a challenge to the precedent.
Rowan County Secretary Kim Davis, with his son Nathan Davis, an deputy secretary, reads a statement to the media outside the Rowan County Palace in Morehead, Ky., On September 14, 2015.
Pablo Alcala/Lexington Herald-Leader/Tribune News Service through Getty Image
“If there was ever a case of exceptional importance,” Stover wrote, “the first individual in the history of the Republic who was imprisoned for following his religious convictions regarding the historical definition of marriage, this should be.”
The lower courts have dismissed Davis’s claims and most legal experts believe that their offer is a remote possibility. A panel of the Federal Court of Appeals concluded Earlier this year, the former employee “cannot raise the first amendment as a defense because he is considered responsible for state action, which the first amendment does not protect.”
Davis, as Rowan County Secretary in 2015, was the only authority responsible for issuing marriage licenses on behalf of the Government under state law.
The judges of the United States Supreme Court pose for their official photo in the Supreme Court of Washington, DC, on October 7, 2022.
Olivier Douliery/AFP through Getty Images
“Not a single judge in the United States Court of Appeals showed any interest in Davis’s rehearsal request, and we are sure that the Supreme Court will also agree that Davis’s arguments do not deserve more attention,” said William Powell, lawyer of David Ermold and David Moore, Kentucky’s couple now married who fears Davis for damage, in a statement to the news of ABC.
A renewed campaign to reverse the legal precedent
Davis’s appeal before the Supreme Court occurs when the conservative opponents of marriage rights for same -sex couples pursue a renewed campaign to reverse the legal precedent and allow each state to establish its own policy.
At the time Obergefell decided in 2015, 35 states had legal or constitutional prohibitions in same -sex marriages, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Only eight states had promulgated laws that explicitly allowed unions.
Until now, in 2025, at least nine states have introduced legislation aimed at block according The Legal Lambda Defense Group.
In June, the South Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the country, overwhelmingly voted To “revoke laws and judicial decisions, including Obergefell v. Hodges, which challenge God’s design for marriage and family” a priority.
Gay couples wait in the row to request a marriage license at the Polk County Administration building on April 27, 2009 in Des Moines, Iowa.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Support for the equal reference of marriage rights
While a large majority of Americans favor equal marriage rights, support seems to have softened in recent years, According to Gallup -60% of Americans supported same -sex marriages in 2015, increasing 70% support in 2025, but that level has stagnated since 2020.
Among the Republicans, support has been submerged significantly in the last decade, below 55% in 2021 to 41% this year, Gallup found.
Davis’s request argues that the question of marriage must be addressed in the same way that the Court handled the issue of abortion in its 2022 decision to cancel Roe V Wade. She concentrates on the concurrence of Judge Clarence Thomas in that case, in which he explicitly requested again to Obergefell.
The judges “must reconsider all the precedents of due substantive process of this court, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote at that time, referring to the historical decisions that deal with a fundamental right to privacy, due process and rights of equal protection.
“It is difficult to say where things will go, but this will be a long job considering how popular marriage between people of the same now,” said Josh Blackman, a prominent conservative constitutional scholar and professor at the South Texas College of Law.
Blackman predicts that many members of the conservative majority of the Supreme Court would want the possible Obergefell challenges to leak in the lower courts before visiting the debate again.
The court is expected to formally consider Davis’s request this fall during a private conference when the judges discuss what cases add to their file. If the case is accepted, it is likely that next spring will be scheduled for an oral argument and decided at the end of June 2026. The court could also reject the case, allowing a ruling from the lower court to maintain and avoid the request to review Obergefell.
“Judges Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett seem very selfless. Maybe Judge Neil Gorsuch also,” said Sarah Isegur, legal analyst at ABC News and presenter of the opinions of advice of legal podcast.
“There is no world in which the Court takes the case as a case of heterosexual homosexual marriage,” Isgur added. “It would have to arise as a lower court that has to obergefell links judges to accept some other type of non -traditional marriage agreement.”
The failure would not invalidate existing marriages
If the ruling was revoked at some point in the future, I would not invalidate the marriages already carried out, the legal experts have indicated. The 2022 respect law for marriage requires that the federal government and all states recognize the legal marriages of same -sex couples and interracial carried out in any state, even if there is a future change in the law.
Davis appealed for the first time to the Supreme Court in 2019 that sought that the demand for damage against her would be discarded, but her request was rejected. Conservative judges Thomas and Samuel Alito coincided with the decision at that time.
“This request implies important questions about the scope of our decision in Obergefell, but does not present them cleanly,” Thomas wrote in a statement.
Many LGBTQ defenders say they are concerned about the changing legal and political landscape around marriage rights.
There is an estimate of 823,000 married same couples in the United States, including 591,000 who married after the decision of the Supreme Court in June 2015, according The Williams Institute at the UCLA Law Faculty. Almost one in five of those married couples is raising a child under 18.
Since Obergefell’s decision, the composition of the Supreme Court has changed to the right, now including three appointments of President Donald Trump and a conservative supermayer of 6 doors.
The president of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, among the current members of the Court who disseminated in Obergefell a decade ago, abruptly criticized the ruling at that time as “an act of will, not legal judgment” without “basis in the Constitution.” He also warned that “he creates serious questions about religious freedom.”
Davis invoked Roberts’s words in his request before the Superior Court, hoping that at least four judges vote to accept his case and listen to arguments next year.
