Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, wrote a statement Monday taking aim at a Supreme Court 2015 decision that cleared the way for same-sex marriage nationwide and suggested that the court must overturn same-sex marriage in order to protect First Amendment rights.
Obergefell v. Hodges was decided in June 2015 and established same-sex marriage throughout the United States. The ruling required all states to recognize same-sex marriage as valid and to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Commenting on an appeal from a former county clerk in Kentucky who objected to issuing same-sex marriage licenses, Thomas wrote that the 5-4 majority in the 2015 case had “read a right to same-sex marriage” into the Constitution, “even though that right is found nowhere in the text.” And he said that the decision “enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots.”
The case that prompted Thomas’s statement concerned Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who gained national attention in 2015 and was jailed after declining to issue marriage licenses in protest of same-sex marriage. The high court last week declined to hear an appeal in her case.
Thomas called Davis “one of the first victims” of the court’s “cavalier treatment of religion” in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision but warned “she will not be the last.” He said that her case was not properly presented before the court, but urged his colleagues to revisit the religious liberty implications of the landmark opinion down the road.
He warned that the court had chosen to “privilege” a “novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, any by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem that only it can fix.”
Thomas also noted that he agreed with the decision to not take up the case, writing that it did not “cleanly present” important questions raised about the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The Associated Press and The CNN Wire contributed to this report
