The Supreme Court has declined to hear a request from Kim Davis to revisit its ruling on gay marriage in the Obergefell ruling. Davis is a former Kentucky county clerk who gained national attention after she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court had declared in Obergefell v. Hodges that states could not ban same-sex marriage. She was later sued by one of those couples. In 2023, a judge ordered Davis to pay $260,000 in attorneys’ fees and other expenses as well as $100,000 to the couple. Davis would appeal the ruling, eventually bringing it to the Supreme Court, where she asked to use the First Amendment in her defense against the lawsuit. Additionally, she asked the court to completely wipe out the Obergefell ruling, stating it “had no basis in the Constitution” and left her “with a choice between her religious beliefs and her job.”

Davis would have needed four votes to have her petition granted. The court did not provide any explanation for why it refused to hear her request. Although Davis’s petition has been largely painted as a long shot, many progressives had watched the case carefully and suggested that Obergefell might be overturned in similar fashion to Roe v. Wade. Justice Clarence Thomas was critical of the original 5-4 ruling in Obergefell, stating in his dissent that the majority was “roaming at large in the constitutional field guided only by their personal views.” In 2020, he also said the decision had “ruinous consequences for religious liberty.” In the Dobbs case in 2022, which overturned Roe, Thomas directly named Obergefell as a decision that could be revisited for “substantive due process precedents.”

Mat Staver, Chairman of Liberty Counsel, which is representing Davis, said the organization will continue to fight the Obergefell ruling. “This cannot be right because government officials do not shed their constitutional rights upon election,” he said. “Like the abortion decision in Roe v. Wade, Obergefell was egregiously wrong from the start. This opinion has no basis in the Constitution. We will continue to work to overturn Obergefell. It is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell.”