Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples way back in 2015, is continuing to press her case, turning up like a bad penny again and again. This time, it’s begging the Supreme Court to hear her cry, oh, and also to entirely overturn Obergefell v. Hodges and get rid of the right to same-sex marriage.

In a normal world, this would be absurd. Demanding that the court overturn a precedent that is only ten years old because a random conservative court clerk is sad should be met with a swift refusal to grant certiorari—but we don’t have a normal court. We have a court dominated by conservative Christians who love overturning precedents and also love giving conservative Christians power over everyone else when it comes to their dislike of the gays. So, Davis’ invitation to the court to overturn Obergefell may, unfortunately, have legs.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have already explicitly called for the court to “reconsider” Obergefell. Alito has been whining about this for years. In a 2020 speech to the Federalist Society, he complained that people who have “traditional views on marriage” could be “labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.” He’s continued to fret about how, if same-sex marriage is legal, bigots will be sad, so we need to get rid of it. 

When the court declined one of Davis’ previous attempts to have her homophobic beliefs enshrined into law back in 2020, Thomas and Alito decided that was a great time to go off, saying that “Davis may have been one of the first victims of this court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision.” In 2024, when the court declined to hear a case about people being removed from a jury because they were opposed to same-sex relationships, Alito again trotted out the “danger” of Obergefell. 

Both Thomas and Alito are chomping at the bit to get rid of same-sex marriage, and Davis knows it. Her petition to the court starts by quoting Thomas’ statement when the court turned her away in 2020, about how Obergefell “threaten[s] the religious liberty of many Americans who believe marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman.” It then dramatically winds through Davis’ ten-year saga of trying to undo same-sex marriage. 

That’s always been Davis’ goal here. Ostensibly, she only wanted the state to remove clerk names entirely from marriage licenses, so her name would never be sullied by appearing on a marriage license for two dudes or two ladies. She achieved that not long after her refusal to issue licenses, as Kentucky then-Gov. Matt Bevin issued an executive order in December 2015 removing clerk names from licenses. 

But since what she wants is the eradication of same-sex marriage, Davis is still going. Sure, she also wants to get out from under the damages and attorney fees she was ordered to pay in a lawsuit filed by one of the couples she refused to issue a marriage license for, but that’s a side quest.

Davis is represented by Liberty Counsel, which has devoted itself to eradicating same-sex marriage and any other rights LGBTQ+ people might wish to enjoy. Liberty Counsel members have prayed with the sitting justices inside the Supreme Court, which should be a catastrophic scandal, especially as, at the time, Liberty Counsel had an amicus brief urging the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver said this was entirely untrue. However, Rob Schenck, a former Christian nationalist who founded Faith and Action, which was folded into Liberty Counsel in 2018, said that he held prayer sessions with conservative judges inside their chambers for two decades. 

Schenck has described how Faith and Action developed a specific plan to woo the court. The group trained rich couples to approach Justices Thomas, Alito, and Antonin Scalia, giving them fancy meals and trips while also offering prayers and Bibles. He also leveraged the Supreme Court Historical Society as a way to get big conservative religious donors in front of the justices. 

Now, we all get to play the waiting game and see if the court’s conservatives see Davis’ latest attempt as a good way to overturn Obergefell. They are certainly primed to keep declaring that LGBTQ+ people have no civil rights if religious conservatives don’t want them to. 

Last term, the majority simultaneously held that parents have no right to ensure their child gets gender-affirming care, but parents who don’t want their children exposed to any books about LGBTQ+ people need a special opt-out provision so that never happens. They carved out a special rule for businesses that refuse to work with same-sex couples even though, as a place of public accommodation, they are required to serve everyone. 

It’s so cool to have civil rights in the hands of six hard-right religious appointees who have expressed open hostility to same-sex marriage. 

Lower courts have held the line on Davis, repeatedly rejecting her attempts to get out from under the damages she has been ordered to pay. But since the Supreme Court has made clear that it doesn’t care at all what lower courts think, who knows what they will do here, but it’s probably bad.