A court has awarded $640,000 to a Texas judge who was disciplined after she refused to officiate a same-sex wedding. The District Court of Travis County ruled in favor of Judge Dianne Hensley of Waco, who recused herself from performing same-sex marriages due to her Christian faith. After gay marriage was legalized in 2015, Judge Hensley refrained from doing any marriages until August 2016, when she began to do marriages for heterosexual couples. She made a referral list for same-sex couples for judges that would perform the ceremony at her same rate.  However, in 2018 Hensley received a public warning from the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct, despite not having received any complaints from the public. The warning accused Hensley of violating the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct. “No same-sex couple has ever complained to the State Commission on Judicial Conduct about Judge Hensley’s referral system, nor has anyone complained to Judge Hensley or her staff about it,” stated Hensley’s suit.

She sued the Commission in 2019, stating it had violated her religious rights under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” “Officiating a wedding ceremony is speech, and the commissioners are preventing Judge Hensley from engaging in this speech unless she agrees to perform homosexual marriages in violation of her Christian faith and in violation of Texas law,” stated Hensley’s representatives. Hensley’s case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2024 that Judge Hensley’s suit could continue back in a lower court. In October 2025, the Texas Supreme Court adopted a comment that allowed a judge to publicly refrain from performing a wedding based on a religious conviction without violating the law. By January 2026, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct did not have the authority to discipline judges who refused to perform same-sex weddings for moral or religious reasons.

Of the settlement $10,000 will go to Judge Hensley for damages, the highest amount that can be awarded. The rest is for attorney fees.  Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for First Liberty Institute, celebrated the settlement. “It’s a great victory for people of faith. It’s important for people of faith to be able to decline to participate in things that they find that are incompatible with their religious faith,” he told Fox News Digital. He also commended Judge Hensley, “I think one of the great things about how Judge Hensley handled things here is that she not only was exercising a religious faith to say, ‘Hey, look, I can do some marriages, but not others,’ but she was also being a good neighbor. She had a referral system in place for people whose weddings she could not perform.” The legal fight for the Commission is far from over as it faces a class action lawsuit from other judges who did not perform any marriages due to fear of discipline from the Commission. The suit alleges the decision cost the judges thousands of dollars in income every year and is seeking damages in tens of millions of dollars for lost income.