Obergefell 10 years later: the hard-fought right to marriage equality could be under serious jeopardy
10 years after the SCOTUS ruling, marriage equality could be under serious attack from an emboldened anti-LGBTQ+ extremist far-right movement.
10 years ago today, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges authored by center-right former SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy that gave LGBTQ+ Americans the hard-won right to marriage equality. The ruling technically overturned the 1971 Baker v. Nelson case. Many Americans rejoice at the ruling, especially LGBTQ+ Americans and their allies.
10 years later, however, Obergefell could be facing serious danger, due to the right-wing war on LGBTQ+ rights waged by the likes of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Liberty Counsel, and Family Research Council (FRC).
Solcyré Burga wrote in Time Magazine on whether marriage equality will remain the law of the land in the wake of the erosion of LGBTQ+ rights (06.26.2025):
When Jim Obergefell and John Arthur boarded a charter medical jet one summer day in 2013 to exchange vows, national attitudes towards same-sex marriage were shifting. That May, a record-high 51% of American adults said they were in favor of allowing queer couples to marry, a dramatic uptick from the just 32% who supported marriage equality in 2003, when Massachusetts became the first state to legalize it following a state Supreme Court decision.
The pair’s rushed ceremony, which took place on the tarmac of the Baltimore/Washington International Airport due to Arthur’s deteriorating ALS condition, cemented the relationship between the couple who had been together for more than two decades.
[…]
Five days later, that bliss was dulled after civil rights attorney Al Gerhardstein explained that Obergefell would not be on his husband’s death certificate because their marriage was not legally recognized by the state of Ohio. “We had just jumped through so many hoops to get married that millions of couples would never have to do, and we simply wanted John to die a married man,” Obergefell says.
Their lawsuit, and several more from other same-sex couples, culminated in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage the law of the land throughout the U.S.
A decade later, some fear marriage equality could soon be at risk.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said as much in a concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, urging the court to reconsider its rulings in Obergefell, along with two other landmark cases, calling them “demonstrably erroneous.”
Only two of the justices that ruled in favor of Obergefell—Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—remain on the court. A subset of the LGBTQ+ community is already facing rolled back protections following the Skrmetti ruling that upheld Tennessee’s gender-affirming-care ban for youth. Advocates are awaiting a decision on Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case regarding opt-out measures for books featuring LGBTQ+ characters, and justices are set to hear arguments for Chiles v. Salazar, which is challenging Colorado’s conversion therapy ban. This year alone, legislators in at least nine states have filed resolutions asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell, with one such lawmaker citing “religious persecution.”
Zachary B. Wolf at CNN on the brewing right-wing backlash against the Obergefell ruling, which is a part of the wider war on LGBTQ+ rights and existence (06.25.2025):
Opposition to marriage equality has never been a part of President Donald Trump’s populist political message, and it has gone largely unremarked that his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is a married gay man. Bessent is the first openly gay married man to be appointed by the Senate in a Republican administration.
But while Trump has no issue with same-sex marriage, there is a brewing backlash among religious conservatives.
► Southern Baptists, at their annual meeting this month, called for the passage of laws challenging the decision.
► Symbolic resolutions calling on the court to revisit Obergefell have been introduced in at least nine state legislatures.
[..]
Some justices would like to reconsider Obergefell
There are Supreme Court justices who came to the bench decades ago, when opposition to gay marriage was a major political issue, who now — with a much more conservative court — would like to revisit the decision and take away nationwide marriage equality.
When the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas called on justices to also revisit Obergefell.
In answer, Democrats, who then controlled the House and Senate, worked with Republicans to pass a law, the Respect for Marriage Act, that voided the Defense of Marriage Act and would require states to honor marriage certificates in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court overturned Obergefell.
Justice Samuel Alito, another vocal critic of the decision, has also endorsed taking another look.
If Thomas and Alito were to get their wish, it’s possible things could turn out differently. The ideological balance on the court has been upended in the past 10 years. Two justices who supported the majority in the Obergefell decision — Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg — have been replaced by more conservative justices.
Axios’s April Rubin on the impact of marriage equality bans should Obergefell be overturned (06.26.2025):
More than two dozen U.S. states have trigger laws that would limit marriage equality if the Supreme Court overturned its legalization of gay marriage.
Why it matters: On the 10 year anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, access to marriage equality faces increasing opposition.
By the numbers: 32 states have constitutional and/or legislative bans on marriage equality — currently unenforceable because of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling.
This means about 60% of LGBTQ+ adults live in states where access to marriage equality would change if Obergefell were struck down, according to the Movement Advancement Project.
From my Blogger post on Obergefell and LGBTQ+ rights (07.23.2015):
The long path to legalizing marriage equality across the USA and its territories ended on June 26th, 2015, when the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling 5-4 in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage.
The day was filled with celebration for equal marriage supporters (including me), while opponents were fuming mad.
Jim Obergefell, the man who sued to get marriage equality legal in his home state of Ohio, wrote an opinion column for LGBTQ+ news site The Advocate on the 10th anniversary of the Obergefell ruling (06.26.2025):
We’ll get through this. We’ve been through worse.
These have been common refrains in the queer community since the November 2024 election. They are something of a balm for the fears we are experiencing under the current administration. With every hateful lie, anti-LGBTQ+ policy, or attack on human and civil rights, our community finds strength in knowing we have been through terrible times before. And every time, courageous people stepped up to create a better world.
Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and others fought against the Lavender Scare, a purge of queer government employees. Marsha P. Johnson was one of many who refused to back down in the face of police harassment at the Stonewall Inn.
In 1973, thanks in part to testimony by Dr. John Fryer, a gay psychiatrist, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Harvey Milk inspired millions to come out and break down harmful, untrue stereotypes of our community. ACT UP, founded by Larry Kramer and other activists, responded boldly to government apathy and antipathy toward the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Evan Wolfson, Edie Windsor, more than thirty plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges, and many others demanded affirmation of our right to marry the person we love.
[…]
In 2025, we stand to lose the rights we have achieved. Things feel worse because they are worse:
Trans rights? Bans on lifesaving gender-affirming care, military service, playing sports with friends, bathroom use, updates to government IDs, and other harmful policies make life impossible for the trans community.
Our right to exist? Laws and policies have made it illegal or unacceptable to say “gay” or “trans” in our schools, fund suicide prevention programs for queer kids, acknowledge the existence of queer people, share our stories in libraries, be honored as veterans, and more.
Marriage equality? State legislatures, faith organizations, Supreme Court justices, and others are doing everything in their power to overturn Obergefell and deny us the right to marry the person we love in the place we call home—a right we have enjoyed for only ten years.
With their Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court rescinded a right that people relied on for 49 years. By turning their back on the bedrock principle of stare decisis, or precedent, this Court proved that they cannot be trusted. Did the justices in the majority lie during their confirmation hearings when they affirmed that they considered Roe settled law? What other conclusion can we draw from their actions?
When the highest court in the land takes away one right, all other rights are at risk. We are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.
In addition to losing rights that we gained in the recent past, we are losing dignity and acceptance in our society. Instead of moving forward toward a more perfect union, our nation is reversing course and embracing the hate and ignorance of the past.
Perhaps the most dire prediction right-wingers made in the first 15 years of this century was that legalizing marriage between two people of the same sex would end civilization.
No less than the pope warned that humankind was in peril because of countries legalizing marriage.
“This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society,” said Pope Benedict in 2012. “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”
The pope wasn’t alone. In the U.S., former Arkansas Gov. and rightwing pundit Mike Huckabee said pretty much the same thing in 2007.
“You have to have a basic family structure,” he warned. “There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived.”
[…]
As absurd as it sounds, this doomsday scenario was a widespread belief among the right in the years leading up to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.
[…]
The omnipresence of this prediction may suggest that people perceive extreme predictions, such as the fall of civilization, as abstractions that they don’t expect to be related to their lived experiences. The idea of civilization failing isn’t just big, it’s too big, so big that it becomes abstract, not something that people feel a need to prepare for because it’s not real. It’s just something the Christian right says that people shouldn’t think about too hard.
In 2014, a year before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit claiming that two pastors, a straight couple named Donald and Evelyn Knapp of Idaho, were being threatened with jail time for refusing to perform marriages for same-sex couples.
This was despite the fact that the city said it never threatened legal action at all against the Knapps and instead only responded to questions about a private business the pastors owned.
The idea that the government would force members of the clergy to perform marriages is absurd. The First Amendment allows religious leaders to refuse to marry anyone for any reason. Members of the clergy don’t have to perform marriages for couples of a different faith, and churches can even set requirements for their own members to be eligible for a wedding in the church – and the government can’t do anything about that.
[…]
Several states, from deep-red Texas to true-blue Hawaii, even passed laws to protect pastors from being jailed for not performing weddings for same-sex couples, even though state lawmakers, many of whom were lawyers who presumably knew about the First Amendment, agreed that this was not something that was going to happen.
Nevertheless, rumors spread on Facebook at the time about pastors being thrown in jail for refusing to marry same-sex couples, including one that was completely made up about a fictitious pastor in Vermont.
This prediction, that pastors would be jailed if they refused to perform same-sex marriages, was made in bad faith. That is, it was just something someone made up to scare people into opposing marriage equality.
More than that, it played into many rightwing Christians’ desire to be oppressed. Despite Christianity’s stranglehold on American politics, conservative Christians like to see themselves as a beleaguered minority fighting against a system that wants to force them to change their views, a powerful system that they are bravely standing up to. Instead of just admitting that they face some minor social pressure to change their views – and plenty of social pressure from people around them to keep their views – they lie and say that they’re truly worried that the government is coming for them.
Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch on the religious right’s war on marriage equality, 10 years after Obergefell (06.26.2025):
Overturning Roe v Wade took anti-abortion activists 50 years, but religious-right groups are hoping to dispatch legal marriage equality much more quickly thanks to shifts on the Supreme Court over the past ten years, with three Trump justices fortifying the far-right flank. Republican state legislators are giving them a hand by trying to pass anti-equality laws that would be challenged in court, giving the Court a chance to reverse Obergefell.
The fact is that anti-equality leaders have never accepted the legitimacy of the Obergefell ruling. They were making plans to overturn it even before the decision was announced. Ryan Anderson—then at the Heritage Foundation and now president of the right-wing Ethics and Public Policy Center—published a long-term game plan for overturning Obergefell, using the successful long-term campaign against Roe as a model. As People For the American Way President Svante Myrick has noted, “Authoritarians have a pattern of chipping away at rights until they win the big prize.”
The right-wing legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom wants to eliminate marriage equality as part of its “generational wins” strategy. ADF’s opposition to marriage equality is part of its long-term hostility to LGBTQ people and their rights, which included urging the Supreme Court to uphold state laws that made being gay a crime; the Court overturned state “sodomy” laws in its 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.
I hope we don’t see the day that Obergefell v. Hodges gets overturned by far-right judicial activists on SCOTUS, because if that day comes, it would be a tragedy far worse than the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe.
May we protect LGBTQ+ rights that are under attack from the Trump Regime, Republicans in Congress, and red-state legislatures! 🏳️🌈
Other big LGBTQ+ rulings on this day:
06.26.2003: SCOTUS invalidated all remaining sodomy bans in Lawrence v. Texas, overturning the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick ruling.
06.26.2013: SCOTUS invalidates Section 3 of DOMA in United States v. Windsor and California’s Prop 8 in Hollingsworth v. Perry.