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The Supreme Court on Monday unceremoniously rejected an attack on same-sex marriage in the United States. The denial of ex-Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis’s case had no noted dissents.
’s co-founder Michael Popok laid out the human stakes in celebrating the victory for hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples and their children.“More than 800,000 couples are in same-sex marriages,” Popok noted. “There are more than 300,000 children whose parents are in a same-sex marriage.”
Davis faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the watershed decision guaranteeing gay couples the constitutional right to marry.
“Even MAGA would not be able to pull that constitutional right,” Popok said, adding the justices “couldn’t count to four” — the number of votes needed for the Supreme Court to grant a petition to review a case.
“Justice Clarence Thomas has been begging since the Dobbs decision in June of 2022 to reconsider the Obergefell decision and rip it away,” Popok noted. “And that’s why MAGA right-wing Christians with a stalking horse of Kim Davis decided, now’s our time. Let’s see if we’ve got the votes because of the Dobbs decision.”
Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito both publicly signaled they were not considering overturning Obergefell, given the reliance interests on hundreds of thousands of couples and their children.
That doesn’t rule out another attack by the likes of Davis and her acolytes.
“Will they try to find a more favorable plaintiff to do it?” Popok asked. “Yes. So we’re not completely out of the woods, but I did want to update. It is a good piece of news.”
In the full, 41-minute conversation, Popok and I run the gamut of legal news. Trump loses two other points of leverage on the shutdown just as eight Democratic-caucusing senators fold, and James Comey tries to disqualify Trump’s former attorney turned top prosecutor Lindsey Halligan on Thursday.
Watch the full conversation at the top of the newsletter.
