Kim Davis tried to get the Supreme Court to stop marriage equality. They just shut her down.
She’s been married four times but has been fighting for a decade to overturn marriage rights for same-sex couples.
The Supreme Court will not hear Kim Davis’ latest appeal in her case about marriage equality. Her appeal asked the Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.
“The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied,” the Court’s order list says in a line about Davis’ appeal. It doesn’t explain why.
LGBTQ+ advocates hailed the decision.
“Today, the Supreme Court affirmed what we all know: marriage equality is the law of the land,” said Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings in a statement. “This is a victory not only for the LGBTQ+ community, but for everyone who believes in our Constitution and the rule of law. The Court’s decision reaffirms a simple fact: equal protection of the law applies to all, not just some.”
Davis was a county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, in 2015 when she refused to give a marriage license to a same-sex couple, citing her religious beliefs. In the past 10 years, she has been sued, jailed, lost her case, and appealed numerous times.
Her latest appeal, filed this past summer, was widely considered a longshot by legal scholars. It asked the supreme Court to review her First Amendment argument to overturn a decision against her. Her lawyers at the hate group Liberty Counsel said that they also asked the Court to consider overturning Obergefell since it “did significant damage to the historic definition of marriage, to states rights, to religious freedom, and to the rule of law.”
This is similar to an argument that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito made in 2020 that the mere existence of married same-sex couples is a violation of Christians’ religious freedom because seeing married same-sex couples encourages people to judge Christians “as bigots.” (That opinion was delivered in the context of a different Kim Davis appeal).
“Since Obergefell, parties have continually attempted to label people of good will as bigots merely for refusing to alter their religious beliefs in the wake of prevailing orthodoxy,” Thomas wrote at the time.
