By Carol Khorramchahi
Boston University News Service
The U.S. Supreme Court’s latest word on same-sex marriage came in the form of a sentence so short it barely registered outside legal circles. However, for, LGBTQ+ families, it was enough to exhale — just not enough to relax.
On Nov. 10, the justices declined to hear an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who became a conservative cause célèbre after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that recognized marriage equality nationwide. Davis had asked the Court not only to rescue her from hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees, but to use her case as an opening to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges altogether, according to case summaries and reporting by the Associated Press and USA Today.
Instead, the Court turned her away in a single sentence with no noted dissents. Legal analysts quickly noted what that silence signaled: there were not even four votes to revisit marriage equality, the minimum needed to take up a case, at least not in this one.
On paper, nothing changed. The Sixth Circuit’s March decision in Ermold v. Davis still stands, upholding a $100,000 jury award to a Kentucky couple Davis refused to license and rejecting her claim that the First Amendment shielded her as a public official from liability for denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene leaves both that judgment and Obergefell v. Hodges intact, according to the appeals court opinion and coverage by outlets including the Associated Press and SCOTUSblog.
In practice, the Court’s nondecision landed in a very specific political moment: one where LGBTQ+ families have learned not to mistake “unchanged” for “untouchable.”
Nationwide, the stakes are enormous. More than 800,000 same-sex couples have married since Obergefell v. Hodges, and they are raising nearly 300,000 children, according to figures cited in recent reporting by the New York Times and other national outlets. Those families are not just celebrating anniversaries, they are filing joint tax returns, relying on employer health coverage, and, in many cases, securing immigration status through marriage. Losing Obergefell v. Hodges would mean more than losing a symbolic victory; it would scramble the legal architecture of everyday life.
Advocacy groups reacted to the Davis order with a tone that could best be described as relieved but unsentimental.
Lambda Legal, in a statement analyzing the denial, called Davis’s petition legally weak and “no surprise” to be rejected, but underscored that opponents of marriage equality are “well resourced” and will keep looking for more favorable vehicles to bring back to the Court.
The Human Rights Campaign, in its own reaction, described the Court’s move as a “reaffirmation” that marriage equality is settled law, while simultaneously pointing to other recent Supreme Court decisions, including those upholding state bans on gender-affirming care for minors, as evidence that broader LGBTQ+ rights remain under sustained pressure.
In other words, the justices did not endorse marriage equality so much as decline an invitation to blow it up.
The denial also arrives in the shadow of the Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and Justice Clarence Thomas’s blunt call, in a concurring opinion, to reconsider Obergefell v. Hodges and other landmark LGBTQ+ and privacy rulings. For couples who watched abortion rights fall despite decades of precedent, reassurance from any branch of government can feel provisional at best.
For now, the legal bottom line is simple: Davis remains on the hook for damages, and same-sex couples’ marriages remain protected under federal constitutional law. However, the emotional takeaway is more complicated.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Kim Davis’s challenge is not a grand affirmation of marriage equality; it is a pause in the fight. For LGBTQ+ families across the country, it is enough to breathe a little easier — but not enough to look away.
