The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an appeal seeking to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
In a brief order issued without comment, the justices declined to hear a case brought by Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the ruling. Davis had appealed a lower-court decision ordering her to pay $360,000 in damages and legal fees to one of the couples she denied.
Davis’s attorneys had urged the Court to reconsider the Obergefell precedent, citing Justice Clarence Thomas’s past writings calling for the decision to be overturned. Thomas, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, dissented from the original 2015 ruling.
While Roberts has not commented on the issue since his dissent, Alito has continued to criticize the decision but recently stated he was not advocating for its reversal. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed after Obergefell, has previously said that while the Court can correct past errors—as it did in overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022—same-sex marriage presents a different case, since millions of couples have relied on it to build families.
Davis became a national figure in 2015 when she defied court orders to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Kentucky, citing her religious beliefs. She was jailed for contempt of court before her staff eventually issued the licenses without her name. The Kentucky legislature later removed clerks’ names from marriage licenses statewide.
Following the Court’s decision, Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson praised the justices for declining to take up the case. “The Supreme Court made clear today that refusing to respect the constitutional rights of others does not come without consequences,” Robinson said.
