WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to reopen the landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the nation, effectively closing the latest challenge brought by former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis.
Davis, who became a national figure after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, had petitioned the high court to review her case. The justices, however, turned down the appeal without comment, leaving intact lower court rulings that ordered her to pay damages to two men she denied a license nearly a decade ago.
The case stems from Davis’s 2015 refusal to grant a marriage license to David Ermold and David Moore, citing her Apostolic Christian faith. “For me, this would be an act of disobedience to God,” she said at the time, framing her stance as a matter of religious conviction rather than discrimination.
In 2022, federal Judge David Bunning ruled that Davis’s personal beliefs did not exempt her from performing her duties as an elected official. “Davis cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official,” the judge wrote.
The Rowan County clerk, once briefly jailed for contempt of court, was later ordered to pay $360,000 (£274,000) in damages to the couple. Her appeal was also dismissed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Davis’s legal team, led by Liberty Counsel attorney Mat Staver, argued that the 2015 same-sex marriage ruling rested on a “legal fiction” and that her client “now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings.”
The high court’s decision not to hear the case comes amid renewed debate over religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, particularly following the Court’s 2023 reversal of Roe v. Wade. Some conservative advocates had hoped the justices—who currently hold a 6-3 conservative majority—might reconsider same-sex marriage precedents as well.
The Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry as a matter of constitutional equality. “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right,” Kennedy wrote in 2015.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who dissented in that case along with three other conservatives, had warned that the ruling imposed a uniform redefinition of marriage across all states. “Today, five lawyers have ordered every state to change their definition of marriage. Just who do we think we are?” he wrote then.
While the Supreme Court’s latest move does not alter existing marriage laws, it underscores the enduring divide between advocates of religious liberty and those defending civil rights protections for same-sex couples.
