SCOTUS Justices Suggest Overturning Marriage Equality
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of Tennessee clerk Kim Davis who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples due to her religious beliefs. However, a dissenting opinion from two of the court’s most conservative justices have now cast doubt for the future of LGBTQ rights and marriage equality.
Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito claimed that the court, in effect, created the right to marriage equality in the 14th amendment and in doing so violated Davis’ religious beliefs by forcing her to issue the licenses. 
In their dissenting opinion, which is unusual for a case rejected by the court, Thomas and Alito declared, “It would be one thing if recognition for same-sex marriage had been debated and adopted through the democratic process allowing the people to decide whether to provide statutory protections for religious liberty under state law, but that it is improper for the court to force that choice upon society through its creation of a-textual constitutional rights and its ungenerous interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, leaving those with religious objections in the lurch.”
“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,” they continued. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”
The 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized marriage equality in al 50 states.
While Thomas and Alito do not currently have a majority of the court to overturn the decision, the ACLU’s Chase Strangio noted on Twitter that it’s unusual to see Supreme Court justices openly show their desire to overturn a five-year-old decision.
“The brazenness of the rightward direction of the Court is a threat to even the most basic expectation of legal protection,” he tweeted.
Vox‘s Ian Millhiser called it astonishing that two Supreme Court justices want to take away civil rights from a minority just because some people who oppose them have been called “unkind words.”
“I don’t know how to characterize Thomas and Alito’s views without using the word ‘supremacist,’” he wrote. “Their apparent belief is that their culture must always be dominant and the Constitution must be interpreted not just to ensure that dominance, but to prevent criticism of it.”
The dissenting opinion of the two conservative associate justices is a major cause for concern, as the Senate is likely to confirm another conservative judge who would likely also be in favor of overturning marriage equality.
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