Kim Davis Fails (Again!) to Ruin Same-Sex Marriage

There’s no great irony quite like a woman who’s tied the knot four times to try and force the rest of the country into her nuptial delusions. But in an increasingly rare stroke of good news, Kim Davis has failed—yet again!—to reverse gay marriage. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined a petition filed by the former county clerk, which asked the justices to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges for the same reasons the Court overturned Roe v.Wade, and to reverse an order requiring Davis to pay more than $300,000 in legal fees to a gay couple whom she denied a marriage license.

“Today, love won again,” Kelley Robinson, the president of Human Rights Campaign, told Jezebel in a statement. “When public officials take an oath to serve their communities, that promise extends to everyone—including LGBTQ+ people. The Supreme Court made clear today that refusing to respect the constitutional rights of others does not come without consequences.”

some good news: kim davis publicly ate shit, again

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— bobby (@bobbylewis.bsky.social) November 10, 2025 at 2:37 PM

The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, and Davis has spent the 10 years since trying to get it overturned. As a Kentucky county clerk, she repeatedly denied marriage licenses to gay couples, asserting she had a First Amendment right to discriminate on behalf of her religious views. Despite being told—multiple times—that this was illegal, she eventually spent five nights in jail in 2015. In 2023, a federal jury ruled she had to pay $100,000 to one of the couples whom she refused a marriage license, and the next year, a federal judge tacked on an additional $260,000 in the couple’s legal fees. Davis then asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the decision, which they turned down in March. In July, she turned to the Supreme Court, which also just rejected her.

In the petition, Davis’ lawyers wrote “Obergefell should be overturned for the same reasons articulated by the court in Dobbs,” saying it “was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today.” They also echoed the arguments of Justice Clarence Thomas, who, in his concurrence in the Dobbs case (which overturned Roe), wrote that the Court should overrule Obergefell, as well as same-sex intimacy (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and the right for married couples to use birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The petition also cited the “history and tradition” test that Justice Samuel Alito used in Dobbs.

In a statement to the New York Times, one of the lawyers said, “It is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell,” adding that his organization, the far-right Liberty Counsel, will still be working to reverse it.

The Supreme Court’s decision to kick Davis to the curb is a surprising one for the conservative-majority court: for her case to have proceeded, at least four of the nine sitting justices would have had to say “yay.” It’s unclear which justices said what, but Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice John Roberts originally dissented in Obergefell—though Roberts hasn’t discussed the subject since 2015, and Alito said in October that he’s not interested in overturning it.

As of 2025, a Gallup poll suggests around 68% of Americans support same-sex marriage—a drop from its peak of 71% in 2022 and 2023. Republican support was 55% in 2021 and 2022, but has since fallen to 41%, the lowest point since 2016, the year after Obergefell passed.

Unfortunately, ending gay marriage was laid out in Project 2025 (shocker), so while Davis might have had her final day in court, there’s likely another pest just waiting to take her place.

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