Marriage Equality The Next Battlefield -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/06/26/marriage-equality-the-next-battlefield/

They did it to abortion ….

Ten years ago this week, in 2015, the US Supreme Court gave same-sex couples access to marriage nationwide, which was controversial at the time but today seems obvious to a large portion of the country.

Seventeen years ago, in 2008, California voters voted to ban same-sex marriage in their state.

Twenty-one years ago, in 2004, President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign won in part — maybe in large part — because Ohio was among 11 states that year where voters also approved state constitutional bans to outlaw same-sex marriage, potentially driving turnout.

That year, in CNN’s presidential exit polls, just one-quarter of Americans thought same-sex couples should be able to legally marry. A larger portion approved of civil unions.

Twenty-nine years ago, in 1996, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

But today, a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision, close to 70% of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, according to some polls.

The country has done a 180.

Unfortunately, the right wing culture warriors haven’t. And they play the long game:

But while Trump has no issue with same-sex marriage, there is a brewing backlash among religious conservatives.

► Southern Baptists, at their annual meeting this month, called for the passage of laws challenging the decision.

► Symbolic resolutions calling on the court to revisit Obergefell have been introduced in at least nine state legislatures.

► Efforts to create a new legal class of marriage — covenant marriage, based on conservative religious teachings — that would be between a man and a woman and make divorce more difficult, have sputtered, so far, in Missouri and Tennessee this year. For context, House Speaker Mike Johnson entered into a covenant marriage in Louisiana.

► Kim Davis, a former county clerk from Kentucky who drew nationwide attention when she defied court orders and refused to issue marriage licenses in 2015 after the Obergefell decision, is still fighting to have the Supreme Court revisit the decision.

There are Supreme Court justices who came to the bench decades ago, when opposition to gay marriage was a major political issue, who now — with a much more conservative court — would like to revisit the decision and take away nationwide marriage equality.

When the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas called on justices to also revisit Obergefell.

Constitutional rights are not safe with this court. It seems impossible that they could ban same-sex marriage but I could easily see them saying that states have a right to refuse to honor them for the purpose of government benefits, things like that. They could easily chip away at it in a dozen different ways. That’s the right wing culture war strategy.

Did you think this all out assault on transgender rights would be the end of it?