The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Liberty Counsel’s petition to overturn the court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling in Obergefell. Mat Staver, who heads the anti-LGBTQ group, insisted the next day that “it’s not if, but when, Obergefell will be overturned.”
While large majorities of Americans support marriage equality, religious-right groups are determined to destroy it. Staver has called the marriage equality ruling a “cancer” on the Constitution.
Liberty Counsel has spent the past decade representing Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to allow her office to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court overturned state marriage bans.
The case that Liberty Counsel asked the Supreme Court to hear was about the specific question of whether Davis could be held personally liable for damages for denying a gay couple the license to which they were entitled. A federal judge ruled against Davis, awarding the couple damages and attorney fees, and an appeals court upheld that ruling.
Liberty Counsel appealed and asked the Supreme Court to go well beyond the legal question at hand and take the opportunity to overturn marriage equality altogether. The Court declined.
It’s good news that the Court rejected Liberty Counsel’s appeal. But Liberty Counsel and other religious-right groups are certainly not going to drop their efforts to overturn marriage equality.
“I have no doubt that Davis’ resolve will serve as a catalyst to raise up many more challenges to the wrongly decided Obergefell opinion,” Staver wrote. He vowed that his group “will continue working with state legislators and individuals to overturn Obergefell and to return the issue of marriage to the states.”
Liberty Counsel has powerful allies who want to see marriage equality eliminated.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-equality legal giant that led the legal effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, views reversing marriage equality as another of its “generational wins” goals. ADF drafted the state law that the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe, and it's nearly certain that ADF is working on a similar strategy to undo Obergefell. ADF was not involved in Kim Davis’s case, but it is active at the Supreme Court this term.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center is headed by Ryan Anderson, who published a road map for overturning marriage equality when he was still at the Heritage Foundation. EPPC fellow Nathanael Blake wrote earlier this year that same-sex couples' ability to get legally married reflects liberalism’s “hatred for human nature.” Another EPPC fellow, Andrew Walker, wrote that same-sex marriage reflects “moral lawlessness.” He mocked gay parents and their families, writing, “If you’re anything like me, the sight of gay and lesbian couples and small children cosplaying in idyllic family settings is proving to be too much.”
