The Movement to Topple Obergefell Is No Longer Fringe

A decade after the Supreme Court legalized same‑sex marriage in Obergefell, advocates in Ohio—the state where the case first took shape—are sounding the alarm. They warn that marriage equality is far less secure than it looks, and the ground beneath it is already shifting. That’s why they are now moving to lock protections into the state constitution in 2026.

Ohio’s urgency reflects a broader national shift that’s already underway. Support for same‑sex marriage has slipped sharply among conservatives, with recent Gallup data showing Republican backing has fallen to its lowest point in nearly a decade. In the most recent Gallup poll, only 41 percent of Republicans say same‑sex marriage should be legally valid. This is the lowest level since 2016. GOP support for same-sex marriage has dropped 14 points since its peak of 55 percent in 2021–2022. And the gap between Republicans (41 percent) and Democrats (88 percent) is 47 points, the widest Gallup has ever measured since it began polling in 1996.

What looked like a settled cultural consensus in the mid‑2010s is now fracturing, as the Right increasingly treats marriage equality not as a closed question but as a live front in the broader fight over social norms. Legislatures in states including Idaho and North Dakota have passed resolutions explicitly urging the Court to overturn the 2015 ruling, while lawmakers in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas have introduced covenant‑marriage bills designed to privilege marriage between one man and one woman, which could trigger a fresh constitutional test. These measures do not overturn anything on their own, but together they signal a coordinated search for a strategically crafted vehicle that the Court can accept.

While LGBTQ+ advocates were encouraged in November when the Supreme Court quietly shut down the Kim Davis appeal, declining to hear her challenge over refusing to issue marriage licenses to same‑sex couples, conservatives noted that the Court’s refusal to hear the appeal from the former Kentucky clerk came without comment or noted dissent, a signal that the justices saw her religious‑objection case as a procedurally messy vehicle rather than a suitable test of Obergefell. For activists and legislators who want the 2015 ruling reconsidered, the message was unmistakable: the Court is not taking up a flawed case, but it has not closed the door on the right one.

Even though the Supreme Court denied Kim Davis’ appeal  in November, leaving Obergefell untouched, the episode reminded Ohio organizers just how dependent same‑sex couples still are on the rulings of the federal courts. Their push for a ballot amendment is, in effect, an insurance policy—similar to the abortion protection initiatives that were passed by several states even before the overturning of Roe with the Dobbs decision. In fact, a close reading of the Dobbs decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, gave conservatives some hope that Obergefell can indeed be overturned. 

In Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote independently to argue that the Court should “reconsider” all substantive‑due‑process precedents, explicitly naming Obergefell as a decision built on a “legal fiction” with “no basis in the Constitution.” That concurrence has become a driving force for activists and legislators who see an opening: if the Court is serious about grounding rights in historical practice, then a ruling that severed marriage from its millennia‑old sacramental and conjugal foundations is uniquely vulnerable. The current wave of resolutions, test‑case plaintiffs, and religious‑liberty challenges is best understood as an attempt to meet the Court where Thomas has already indicated, by presenting a case that forces the justices to confront the historical meaning of marriage rather than the modern sentiment that reshaped it.

As all faithful Catholics know, for nearly two thousand years, marriage in the West was understood as a sacrament—a covenantal union rooted in sexual complementarity and oriented toward the creation of new life. When the Supreme Court redefined marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, it didn’t expand the institution of marriage; rather, it severed it from the very roots that gave it meaning.

Still, in a recent interview with CBS, Amy Coney Barrett responded to concerns that the Supreme Court might overturn Obergefell by saying that

What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided, and sometimes the American people have expressed themselves in the Constitution itself, which is our fundamental law, sometimes in statutes, but the court should not be imposing its own values on the American people. 

When pressed about her own statement in her new book Listening to the Law, describing the “rights to marry” as fundamental, she affirmed that she was simply restating existing Supreme Court doctrine, signaling no appetite to reopen the 2015 ruling. In response to Barrett’s book and statement, the Log Cabin Republicans, the largest LGBTQ+ organization representing Republicans, posted on 𝕏: “Yet more proof that the Supreme Court has little interest in revisiting Obergefell and marriage equality…from conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett.”

The real test of Obergefell will not come from what the Court has already said but from the case it chooses to hear next. Same-sex marriage remains formally intact but increasingly contested, vulnerable to the same legal strategy that toppled Roe. Ohio’s scramble to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples at the ballot box is not an outlier—it is a preview of the political terrain ahead, where cultural consensus is declining, partisan divides are widening, and the Court’s future posture is anything but guaranteed.