WASHINGTON, D.C. – The US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, leaving intact the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
The court’s move effectively ends Davis’s long legal battle, confirming that the landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges remains the law of the land — a decade after it transformed the landscape of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States.
Davis, an Apostolic Christian, had refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples on religious grounds, famously stating that doing so would be “an act of disobedience to God.”
Her stance made her a hero to many religious conservatives but also led to her serving six days in jail for contempt of court.
She was later ordered to pay $360,000 (approximately £274,000) in damages to David Ermold and David Moore, a couple who sued her for violating their constitutional right to marry.
Federal Judge David Bunning ruled in 2022 that Davis’s personal beliefs did not exempt her from fulfilling her duties as a public 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 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld that decision, prompting Davis’s legal team to take her appeal to the Supreme Court.
Her lawyer, Mat Staver of the conservative Liberty Counsel, said Davis now faces “crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings.”
Some conservatives had hoped the current 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court might revisit the issue, particularly after the court overturned Roe v. Wade — the ruling that legalized abortion — in 2023.
However, by declining to take up Davis’s case, the justices have left the Obergefell v. Hodges precedent untouched.
In that 2015 decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that same-sex couples seeking marriage “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Three of the four conservative justices who dissented in the case — including Chief Justice John Roberts — still serve on the court. In his dissent, Roberts warned:
“Today, five lawyers have ordered every state to change their definition of marriage. Just who do we think we are?”
The Supreme Court’s refusal to reopen the debate underscores the enduring legacy of the Obergefell decision — and the continuing tension between religious freedom and LGBTQ+ rights in America’s cultural and legal landscape.
