Supreme Court conservatives blocked gay marriage challenge to protect GOP: expert

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by anti-LGBTQ county clerk Kim Davis to overturn the landmark decision on same-sex marriage — but a legal expert cautioned the decision was politically calculated to protect the Republican Party.

The justices swatted away the former Kentucky clerk's long-shot appeal of a jury's order to her to pay a gay couple $360,000 in damages for violating their civil rights after she refused to grant them a marriage license a decade ago. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern has a theory why the court denied her request to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.

"Davis’ chief claim is that she should be able to raise a constitutional defense to the lawsuit against her, claiming a First Amendment right to deny the marriage license based on her own religious liberty," Stern wrote.

"She lost that argument at every court below, because — and this is pretty obvious — an agent of the state who’s performing a government service has no right to unlawfully discriminate against members of the public. Nor does such an individual have any entitlement to take the law into her own hands, defy a court order, and decline to perform the basic functions of her office."

"Even hard-right judges who oppose Obergefellhad to acknowledge that she had no constitutional leg to stand on," he added.

Davis' lawyers at the right-wing Liberty Counsel tacked on a request to overturn the 2015 ruling that recognized same-sex marriage after losing several rounds of litigation, which Stern said was added to her Supreme Court petition almost like an afterthought.

"If Liberty Counsel’s primary goal was to draw attention — and, by extension, fundraising dollars — by taking on marriage equality itself, it worked," Stern wrote. "Media coverage of this case was wildly disproportionate to its (near-zero) chances of success."

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito signaled their willingness to revisit Obergefell in a previous Davis appearance before them, in 2020, but not one justice wrote a word about her latest appeal, and none of them expressed interest in taking up her case.

"What does this tell us? Nothing we didn’t already know," Stern wrote. "Thomas and Alito may still be gunning for Obergefell. But the other Republican appointees appear uninterested in killing it."

"If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote," Stern added. "But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party."