The Supreme Court on Monday declined an opportunity to overturn its landmark precedent recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, tossing aside an appeal that had roiled LGBTQ advocates who feared the conservative court might be ready to revisit the decade-old decision.
Instead, the court denied an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who now faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees for refusing to issue marriage licenses after the court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges allowed same-sex couples to marry.
The court did not explain its reasoning to deny the appeal, which had received outsized attention – in part because the court’s 6-3 conservative majority three years ago overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion that 1973 decision established. Since then, fears about Obergefell being the precedent to fall have grown.
This one I can see lasting for a while. With abortion, there’s at least a valid discussion about when existing rights begin to apply to a fetus. Even without the religious angle, there’s some discussion to be had (ie at conception vs at viability vs at birth).
With same-sex marriage, they would have to justify taking away a right from adult citizens. That’s going to be damn hard to do without resorting to a purely religious angle. I don’t think they are ready to go full on theocracy yet. Maybe during Trump’s third term.
Trans people who just lost their (our) passports:
Yeah… I’ve said this before: they kicked all the trans soldiers out of the military already. They also fired a bunch of high-ranking female officers. Then Hegseth went on his rant about how he only wants “manly men” in the military. It’s only a matter of time before they try to disqualify gay/lesbian people from serving, and probably all women at some point. And we will see more attempts like this one to overturn hard-won rights in other areas.
I’m abroad (most likely permanently) and I get the feeling I’m gonna have to fight to stay here on an expired passport. The silver lining is that the more they attack us the more of a case I have. My immigration lawyers are gonna love me.
Their play is that they don’t allow renewals with the “wrong” marker, but they also don’t allow gender marker changes so if you’re trans you’re fucked. The cruelty is the point. The recent SCROTUS ruling turns this from policy into law.
Consider that the only difference between a woman marrying a man and a woman marrying a woman is the sex/gender of one of the people. They have to figure out how to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964 first. That’s the one that says you can’t discriminate based on sex/gender (not sure which term is most appropriate here).
That’s exactly the argument that Roe v Wade made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade
When Trump’s activist judges overturned it, they argued that not criminalizing abortion gave women rights that the constitution did not explicitly protect(?)
Because according to incompetent/corrupt Trump judges, that’s how the constitution works now.
No they didn’t. They decided that the question of legality should be returned to the States because Roe v Wade was decided based on a 14th Amendment Right of Privacy through Due Process. Your comment is about the practical outcome of their decision in some places.
Frankly I still think RBG had the correct legal argument and that Roe should have been decided on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
If only the framers had realized that they couldn’t possibly list all the rights people have. I mean, one might say the list would be innumerable!
Yeah, it’s a real shame that they never got around to writing a 9th and 10th Amendment…oh…wait…
No problem:
There we go. All around, a good day’s work.
If they can invent presidential immunity despite there being absolutely nothing in the constitution to justify it, I’m sure they have no problem writing an opinion that allows bans on gay marriage.
My best guess would be that they would frame it as being about the right of the states to regulate marriage. If the state can decide how many people can be in a marriage, how old you have to be to marry, how closely related you can be and still marry, the requirements for starting or ending a marriage, and so on, then what’s one more criteria? Add some tangents about the history of marriage in the US, some comments about how government is involved in marriage specifically because of how it connects to issues relating to reproduction, cite some cases from the 19th century, and twist some more recent precedent to reverse its meaning so that you can pretend to be following existing case law and you have a pretty standard ruling for this court.
Except they had the opportunity to do just that and refused. So obviously they have some kind of problem with it.
I never said they would actually do it, only that they wouldn’t find it difficult to write that opinion. Seeing as they’ve had multiple cases in recent years where the opinion was completely untethered from law, precedent, and fact, there’s basically no position so extreme that I would assume they can’t rationalize it.
And yet we have a case right here that suggests they don’t have a way to do that. There are too many gay couples who got married, and nobody wants to sort out the mess of them suddenly losing that.
They may not have felt that this was a good case for their purposes. Or enough of them may have felt that this was a bad time for it. Hell, maybe a couple of the conservative justices just don’t care enough to want to revisit the issue.
But respect for the law, the constitution, and the rights and wellbeing of the people hasn’t been evident in many of their recent opinions. Letting half the states pretend a fraction of marriages never happened wouldn’t even be the most disruptive thing they’ve done. They endorsed racial profiling, made racial gerrymandering presumptively legal, made prosecuting bribery essentially impossible, overturned abortion rights, and crowned Trump as king and gave him a license to kill. And that’s ignoring all the shenanigans happening on the shadow docket where they don’t even bother justifying their decisions. That they’ve at least drawn something of a line against the Trump administration trying to eliminate due process altogether makes sense only because letting go of due process would mean giving up some of their own influence.
If they want to rule arbitrarily on this, then there’s no reason to avoid this particular case. If they don’t want to rule arbitrarily, then they need to think through the implications, and there is no getting around some major practical issues.
Thomas has explicitly signalled that he wants to revisit Obergefell, and Barrett probably would, too. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, though, probably want to leave it alone, and combined with the three liberal justices, they ended it all right here.