The Supreme Court on Monday denied an appeal from Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who in 2015 refused to administer marriage licenses to gay couples after the court’s landmark decision on gay marriage.
Davis, whose case has been working its ways through appeals courts for years, originally made headlines for being one of the first government officials to challenge the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges on the basis of religious disagreement with the ruling. In her most recent appeal, a court ruled that Davis had violated the rights of gay couples by refusing to issue them licenses.
Commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision to deny Davis’s appeal, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that, while he believed that her case “does not cleanly present” challenges to unanswered questions raised by Obergefell, he believes that Davis is one of the “first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision.”
“She will not be the last,” Thomas wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Samuel Alito. “Due to Obergefell, those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul of Obergefell and its effect on other antidiscrimination laws.”
Thomas added that he does not take issue with the adoption of gay marriage necessarily, but rather that he takes issue with the court’s “creation of atextual constitutional rights and its ungenerous interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, leaving those with religious objections in the lurch.”
“Obergefell enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss,” he wrote, adding that, in the case of Davis, Obergefell “was read to suggest that being a public official with traditional Christian values was legally tantamount to invidious discrimination toward homosexuals.”
Since the Obergefell decision, Thomas argued, proponents of gay marriage “have continually attempted to label people of goodwill as bigots merely for refusing to alter their religious beliefs in the wake of prevailing orthodoxy.”
Thomas and Alito raised similar concerns this summer after the court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which reinterpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to provide protections for gay and transgender people. Although the case did not itself concern a clash between gay and transgender issues and religious freedom, both justices, as well as Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, predicted that through its ruling, the two groups will clash.
The court next month is slated to hear one such case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, settling a dispute between the city’s policy on gay couples and a Catholic-run adoption agency’s refusal to serve them based on religious belief.
