Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 10, 2025 / 18:12 pm (CNA).
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined a request to overturn its 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage.
Kim Davis, a Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk from 2015 through 2019, petitioned the Supreme Court in July to reconsider the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which legalized same-sex civil marriages nationally.
Davis requested the court also hear her case 10 years later after she made headlines for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She served multiple days in jail for contempt of court for violating a judicial order to issue the marriage licenses.
Davis was ordered to pay more than $360,000 in damages and legal fees for violating a same-sex couples’ right to marry. After lower courts rejected her claim that the the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free exercise of religion protected her in the case, she appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration did not weigh in on the case as the Supreme Court considered whether to take up the matter. The Supreme Court made the decision to reject the request on Nov. 10 and has made no comment on the matter.
The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“The First Amendment applies differently with regard to the actions of public officials than private individuals,” said Jipping in a Nov. 10 interview with “EWTN News Nightly.” Davis “was acting in her official capacity as a county clerk, and that’s a very different legal question.”
Jipping said Davis’ situation was not the “right case” to reach the Supreme Court and reverse Obergefell v. Hodges because it was not a case in which someone challenged a state legislature’s law in conflict with the precedent.
Mary Rice Hasson, Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA she agreed the case was not the right vehicle to reconsider the Obergefell decision.
“As Catholics, our energies will be better spent explaining and promoting the truth about marriage and sexuality to our children and fellow Catholics rather than hoping for a reversal of Obergefell,” Hasson said.
Many American Catholics support the legalization of same-sex civil marriages at about the same rate as the broader population. According to a 2024 Pew poll, about 70% of self-identified Catholics said they support same-sex marriage, which was slightly higher than the population as a whole.
Hasson said: “It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator.”
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Kim Davis talks of her religious objections to same sex marriage, being that same sex marriage is a violation of the sanctity of marriage. She has been divorced three times.
If I remember correctly that’s an option in the Orthodox Church. You get more than one try.
William’s comment was the standard slogan back in the day and it’s still a childish cheap shot. Just because I punched a guy in the nose doesn’t mean I’m disqualified from objecting to murder. He really should try for an original reaction some day if actual thought isn’t in his wheelhouse.
The reality, whether we like it or not, is that Luther (who diminished marriage to an affair of state in his project to truncate the list of sacraments) and Tudor (who despite lending his name to a likely ghost-written defense of the seven Sacraments, gave us an exhibit in ” all heresy begins below the belt”) are the authors both of Davis’ serial monogamy as well as what Anthony Esolen referred to as “pseudonogamy”.
Once the state was made the custodian of the institution, it was likely to do what governments have always attempted to do-establish dominion. While I doubt
that either man could have anticipated that it would ever have been so transmogrified-THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE for ceding marriage to the state, ignoring the injunction to render to God what is God’s.
Nor is Davis’ position completely indefensible. Generally left of center “law professor” (sorry, I’ll never see a JD on par with an MD or a PhD in Chemistry) Eugene Volokh stated maintained that “an employer must try to accommodate religious employees’ beliefs”.
An implied accusation of hypocrisy usually reveals a hypocritical refusal to understand the meaning of the word. Hypocrisy is not the failure to live with fidelity to one’s standards or values. We’re all weak, and everyone fails. Hypocrisy is the presumption of objective moral principles and exercising objective moral outrage as a basis for implicity faulting another for believing in objective moral principles and exercising objective moral outrage.
Could Kim Davis not have just resigned rather than betray her conscience? Or face getting slapped with these fines?
J.M.J.
While it is true that every divorce, invalidates the validity of the marriage contract, no State has the authority to coerce any person into participating in the affirmation of the engaging in of sexual acts that regardless of the actors or the actor’s desires, even if the actors are a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife, deny the Sanctity of the marital act, which is Life-affirming and Life-sustaining, and can only be consummated by a man and woman who have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife. No State has the authority to coerce any person to render onto Caesar, what Has Always And Will Always Belong To God, “The Most Holy Undivided Trinity”.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-paris
Our Inherent Unalienable Rights , which are grounded in the Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life from the moment we are Created and brought into being at the moment of our conception , are unalienable and cannot be relinquished even if we so desire because these Unalienable Rights are Endowed to us from God, The Most Holy Undivided (Blessed) Trinity, The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, not Caesar.
“The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
The Constitution does not provide for the relinquishing of our inherent unalienable Right to Religious Liberty when we are serving as a public official. Our inherent unalienable Rights are endowed to us from God, with the capital G, not Caesar.
Hasson said: “It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”
It is a scandal that those who were Baptized Catholic but no longer desire to fulfill their Baptismal Promises have yet to be Charitably Anathema for the sake of their Redemption, and The Salvation of Souls.
It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”
Do they? Everybody knows what is referred to as “globohomo” has enlisted every institution as a coercive force in requiring the acceptance of non just SSM but the identification as gay.
If you want to work in any company of significance, you will have “diversity, equity and inclusion forcibly shoved down your gullet.
It’s easier to just go with enforced view.
Obergefell, a pet project of Anthony Kennedy, who began his efforts with Lawrence v. Texas by claiming that the prohibited acrs were “customary” among homosexually inclined people (and theft is customary amoung thiefs, so what”, wrote an opinion in Obergefell that was described by commenter and supporter Andrew Koppelman
“All of Kennedy’s worst traits — the ponderous self-importance, the leaps of logic, the worship of state power — were on display. For a decision this important, the Court should have been able to do better.”
Of course in a supreme ipse dixit Koppelman admitted these deficiencies and still claimed the decision was correct.
Now it’s a public franchise you WILL accept and celebrate (for an entire month, unlike military veterans that put their lives on the line who just get 11/11.).
“The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Where in the Constitution does it state that public officials must relinquish their Right to Religious Liberty?
I am surprised The Supreme Court did not respond, but I suppose the lack of response on their part in regards to the violation of both The First and Eighth Amendments Of The Constitution Of The United States Of America in this particular case may be due to the erroneous notion that Religious Liberty should be viewed as a States Right issue and is no longer a Human’s Right Issue, which I suppose one could argue is an error in both Substantive and Procedural Due Process Law.
Woe to us!
Once you deny The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, and claim that in order to be married it is no longer necessary for a man and woman to have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, invalidating the validity of a valid marriage contract, any relationship can be declared a marriage, if one so desires and the State no longer can serve to protect and defend The Marital Contract of husband and wife, making their authority in the defense of the marital contract null and void.
Just a thought:
Perhaps a class action suit filed for the failure of a judge’s fiduciary duty in regards to protecting the marital contract by deliberately changing the marital contract through the removal of the necessary marital clause, so that in order to be married, it is no longer necessary for a man and woman to have both the desire and ability to exist in relationship as husband and wife, in essence promoting adultery while claiming to protect the marital contract, which would be more than just a contradiction in terms?
And how would this happen?
Do you not realize a major part of the campaign to legalize pseudonogamy was financed by lawyers, law firms and bar associations? They all understood that making a new class of legally recognized, inherently unstable unions would create a rich vein of revenue in prenups, legal separations, divorces, wills, estates and inter vivos trusts?
If you ask cui bono? Few profited as much as the Bar. They’ll do nothing to act against their own interest. I once had a Columbia trained lawyer tell me “the law is about equity, not justice”. Once that was explicitly stated, I got over any childish notions about how the law works.
Why all the fuss about same sex marriage? Most of us really don’t care.
William, it sounds like you do not care about affirming the inherent Dignity of those persons who engage in demeaning sexual acts that deny their inherent Dignity, or care about the fact that those who respect the inherent Dignity of every human person are being forced to promote the engaging in or affirmation of demeaning sexual acts that deny the inherent Dignity of all persons. How can anyone claim that marriage, which consists of a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife discriminates against either a man or a woman because
in order to be married one must have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, and thus be married to each other.
Re Mrs. Cracker above (9:34 a.m.)
Resigning is a less-than-ideal “solution” to a conflict of conscience like that faced by Kim Davis.
That would pave the way for the forced removal of medical professionals who oppose abortion and euthanasia, for example.
(OTOH, if you make sure certain people aren’t hired for sensitive positions in the first place, you won’t have to worry about them quitting on you.)