by WorldTribune Staff, September 29, 2025 Real World News
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider in the coming weeks whether it will take up a formal request to overturn the Obergefell v. Hodges decision which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
A petition filed by former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in July asks the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 landmark decision. While seen as a longshot, the Court is expected to decide in early October whether to grant review.
The topic is gaining steam among conservatives.
Katie Faust, founder of Them Before Us, told an audience at the recent National Conservative Conference that gay marriage had upended children’s rights, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported on Sunday.
“The last 10 years have made one thing unmistakably clear,” Faust said. “We can either recognize gay marriage, or we can recognize a child’s right to their mother and father. We can’t do both.”
Downstream effects of gay marriage, from enabling two men to have an unrelated child through surrogacy arrangements to the weakening of legal protections for biological parents, hurt children, Faust argued.
Davis had previously brought her case to the Supreme Court in 2020 on the question of qualified immunity, without explicitly asking them to overrule Obergefell. The justices declined to take it at the time, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to highlight how Davis’s case provided “a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell.”
“By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem that only it can fix,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas also suggested in his Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concurrence that Obergefell should be reconsidered. Yet the Dobbs majority explicitly wrote that nothing in its opinion “should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”
John Eastman, founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, said during a National Conservative Conferenc panel that the Supreme Court calling for a response to Davis’s petition suggests signals “they’re very interested in the case,” although he doubts they would address her broad request to overturn Obergefell.
“They’re much more incremental than that, and if they could decide it just on a religious liberty claim, I think they probably would,” Eastman said.
Public support for gay marriage remains higher than it was in 2015, at 68%, according to a May Pew Research poll. Yet among Republicans, there has been a 14% drop in support since 2022.
Marriage is not for us to redefine. It’s God’s plan for the world.
-Rabbi Ilan Feldman at NatCon 5’s “Overturn Obergefell” panel pic.twitter.com/f4ejkylWOz
— National Conservatism (@NatConTalk) September 4, 2025
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