The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to revisit its 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the country, leaving that decision unchanged. The denial came in a case brought by Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the landmark ruling. By declining to take the case, the Court left in place a lower-court judgment requiring Davis to pay approximately $360,000 in damages and legal fees to a couple who had been denied a marriage license.
Davis argued that issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples would have violated her religious beliefs. Her refusal came directly after the Supreme Court’s June 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, a ruling that established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The ruling stated that both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee the right to marry to same-sex couples. At the time of the decision, same-sex marriage had already been legalized in 36 states and Washington, D.C. Since the ruling, research from the Williams Institute estimates that nearly 600,000 same-sex couples have married nationwide.
The Obergefell ruling was determined by a narrow 5-4 majority. Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan formed the majority. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the late Antonin Scalia dissented. Since then, Thomas has expressed interest in reconsidering the decision, while Alito has been critical of its legal reasoning but has recently indicated he is not advocating for its reversal. Roberts has not revisited the issue publicly since his original dissent.
Davis became a central figure in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 ruling. At that time, a small number of counties in southern states continued to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In Kentucky, Davis requested legal protection for clerks who opposed the ruling on religious grounds. State law required clerks to issue licenses under their own name, and she subsequently refused to grant licenses first to same-sex couples and later to all couples to avoid discrimination claims.
A federal judge ordered Davis to issue licenses to all eligible couples. When she did not comply, the judge found her in contempt of court and jailed her for eight days. She was released after her office staff began issuing licenses without her name appearing on the documents. The Kentucky legislature later changed state law so that marriage licenses no longer list the name of any county clerk, a measure that addressed the administrative conflict raised in the case.
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