The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected an attempt to overturn the decision that nearly a decade ago guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide. The petition came from Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky, who sought to nullify the 2015 ruling after a jury ordered her to pay damages to a couple she had refused to issue a marriage license to.
“The Court can and should correct this mistake,” her lawyers argued in the filing. But in a brief order, the justices declined to take up Davis’s appeal, dismissing it along with dozens of other petitions discussed during the Court’s weekly closed-door session. No opinions or dissents were published.
Although legal experts initially viewed Davis’s petition as having little chance of success, it alarmed LGBTQ+ rights advocates, as several conservative justices who previously opposed the landmark 2015 ruling—Obergefell v. Hodges—still sit on the bench. That decision established the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry.
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Davis gained national attention after declaring religious objections to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the 2015 ruling. Among those she turned away were David Ermold and David Moore, who later sued her. In a separate proceeding, a court ordered Davis to resume issuing licenses. When she refused to comply, she was jailed for five days, while the couple ultimately received their certificate. Kentucky later passed a law allowing clerks to omit their signatures from marriage documents.
Despite that, Davis continued to pursue her legal battle after a jury awarded the plaintiffs $100,000 in damages for emotional distress and an additional $260,000 in attorneys’ fees. Her appeal argued that she had the right to invoke religious freedom under the First Amendment, even while acting as a public official. She also urged the Court to overturn the Obergefell decision entirely, claiming that doing so would nullify the lawsuit against her.
The couple’s lawyers countered that this argument was not properly presented to the Supreme Court, since Davis had previously abandoned it during the earlier proceedings. “The Court should hold her to her prior position,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys stated. “Moreover, revisiting Obergefell in this context would first require determining how such a ruling would affect Davis’s personal liability.”