Supreme Court declines to hear challenge to same-sex marriage decision

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Nov 10, 2025 / 18:12 pm (CNA).

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined a request to overturn its 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage. 

Kim Davis, a Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk from 2015 through 2019, petitioned the Supreme Court in July to reconsider the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which legalized same-sex civil marriages nationally.

Davis requested the court also hear her case 10 years later after she made headlines for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She served multiple days in jail for contempt of court for violating a judicial order to issue the marriage licenses.

Davis was ordered to pay more than $360,000 in damages and legal fees for violating a same-sex couples’ right to marry. After lower courts rejected her claim that the the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free exercise of religion protected her in the case, she appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Trump administration did not weigh in on the case as the Supreme Court considered whether to take up the matter. The Supreme Court made the decision to reject the request on Nov. 10 and has made no comment on the matter. 

The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. 

“The First Amendment applies differently with regard to the actions of public officials than private individuals,” said Jipping in a Nov. 10 interview with “EWTN News Nightly.” Davis “was acting in her official capacity as a county clerk, and that’s a very different legal question.” 

Jipping said Davis’ situation was not the “right case” to reach the Supreme Court and reverse Obergefell v. Hodges because it was not a case in which someone challenged a state legislature’s law in conflict with the precedent.

Mary Rice Hasson, Kate O’Beirne senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told CNA she agreed the case was not the right vehicle to reconsider the Obergefell decision.

“As Catholics, our energies will be better spent explaining and promoting the truth about marriage and sexuality to our children and fellow Catholics rather than hoping for a reversal of Obergefell,” Hasson said.

Many American Catholics support the legalization of same-sex civil marriages at about the same rate as the broader population. According to a 2024 Pew poll, about 70% of self-identified Catholics said they support same-sex marriage, which was slightly higher than the population as a whole.

Hasson said: “It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator.”