Supreme Court Allows Peasants To Keep Their Same-Sex Marriages, For Now
And Kim Davis has to pay the fuck up!
What is this strange sensation, is it good news?
Without comment, on Monday the Supreme Court rejected an invitation from same-sex-marriage-hating hypocrite Kim Davis and her Liberty Counsel lawyers to revisit their 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage. So yay, guess everybody’s gay marriage is safe, for the moment anyway!
And double yay, rotten hag Kim Davis has to pay the fuck up to a couple she denied a marriage license, David Ermold and David Moore, $360,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees, plus interest, we assume. That’s a nice bit of 10th-anniversary tin for the Davids and probably mostly their lawyers!
REMEMBER HER?
Why did the Supremes not take up Davis’s appeal? They aren’t saying, but Amy Comey Barrett has hinted it’s because undoing previously sanctioned marriages would unleash legal chaos across the land. Since the Court’s 2015 decision, more than 800,000 same-sex couples have married, and they’re raising some 300,000 children. It’s not simple to snap-undo a decade’s worth of families’ legal and financial enmeshment, and make them what? Insta-annulled, force-divorced? Just roommates?
And, some of those couples are even right-wing billionaire donors, or in Trump’s own Cabinet, conducting the orchestra at the Kennedy Center. Has the arc of justice finally bent towards Adam and Steve and Eve and Genevieve?
On the other hand, it might not turn out to be the biggest hooray. A SCOTUS non-decision is hardly a rousing endorsement, and Clarence Thomas already turned Kim Davis down in 2020 for not cleanly presenting her issues, though he’d heartily agreed with her that she’d been victimized terribly as a fine Christian woman by the whole ordeal. But Davis never had a right to defy a court order and refuse to do her job. And Davis is not a sympathetic character. Her Apostolic-Christian sincerely held belief in the sanctity of marriage apparently includes getting divorced three times, spending a decade in courts Karening the same song and dance, and never conditioning her hair.
With the SCOTUS Six there’s the strong possibility that they are biding their time until they have a better case that more effectively does whatever it is that they eventually plan to do to make it MAGA Jesus’s kingdom here on earth. Like a case that lets them carve out a states’ rights type of move so Texas can have some discrimination as a treat.
But even the right-wing justices can’t escape having to face gay couples in their own social circles. Not that it will keep Martha-Ann Alito from flapping her hand-sewn APPEAL TO HEAVEN flag at the gays vacationing across the lagoon from her at her New Jersey beach house, and hoping that it makes them feel great VERGOGNA!
Oh, that Martha-Ann, screaming again, shrug Ric Grennell and husband Matt, Scott Bessent and husband John, Peter Thiel and husband Matt, and Paul Singer’s son Andrew with his husband Corey, to one other from their AirBnb hot tub.
Here we are, a decade later, and none of the horrors that conservatives had predicted have arrived, like people being forced-gay married, and everybody marrying the dogs and marrying the cats and the sanctity of marriage going to hell. The divorce rate actually went down over the past decade even as the marriage rate stayed about the same, how nice! Even Donald Trump himself has managed to stay married for two decades. And Rosie O’Donnell has stayed single, who could have predicted that? And nearly 70 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage rights.
But don’t think that any of these six are embracing the rainbow. This SCOTUS non-ruling comes directly in the wake of them denying rights to trans and nonbinary people, including allowing Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to witch-hunt and kick trans service members out of the military, and letting states’ laws override children’s parents, doctors, and the AMA to ban gender-affirming care for minors, forcing schools to censor books with gay and trans characters in them, and forcing states to pay for discriminatory religious schools.
And then last week they ruled that non-binary people are no longer allowed to put “X” on their passports, with the justification that “the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact” of someone’s birth sex.
But, since 2022 parents have been able to put “X” on a newborn’s birth certificate, and a certain percentage of babies are born intersex, they truly do not have a sex assigned at birth, making a sex marker not a “historical fact” for everyone, actually. Those parents and/or children must now pick one gender and stick to it, it seems. This also overturns precedent all the way back to the 1629 Quarter Court of Jamestown decision in the case of Thomasine Hall that found gender can be nonbinary, which is fine, as long as you’re not misleading people into debauchery! Nonbinary people have always existed and still always will.
It’s hard to know just what this Supreme Court is thinking any more. They don’t care about scientific evidence or what the AMA has to say any more, they don’t care about legal precedent any more. They care about siding with Lord King Trump and whatever he wants to do, their pig more equal than others before the law.
And the rest we can only guess!
[Washington Post gift link / Human Rights Watch]
Thank you for being Wonkette’s friend! We have no paywall ever, and no ads, because we’re brought to you by people like you! The button below will let you donate one time or monthly, in any amount of your choosing.
Amy Coathanger says that they won't hear this case because "undoing previously sanctioned marriages would unleash legal chaos across the land."
Huh? Undoing a previously sanctioned women's right to health care and control of their bodies, which resulted in absolute legal chaos across the land, didn't seem to bother them at all. Why is that a problem now?
Oh Kimmie you're so blind
you're so blind
now pay the fine
Hey Kimmie
Hey Kimmie