As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear a petition from former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis seeking to overturn same-sex marriage, an attorney has advised LGBT+ couples considering getting hitched not to wait.
“I always tell people don’t be scared. Just be prepared,” Angela Giampolo of Philadelphia’s Giampolo Law Group told CBS News.
“If you are in a committed relationship and you were and are considering getting married, I do advise doing so sooner rather than later – safely, with a pre-nuptial,” she said, advising couples to be proactive and get legal documentation beyond a marriage certificate to secure their rights in case the highest court ultimately takes the case and sides with Davis.
The activist is seeking to overturn the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges ruling, the landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, citing her religious beliefs.
There are now more than 820,000 married same-sex couples in the U.S., more than double the total at the time the ruling was passed a decade ago. Nearly 300,000 children are being raised in those families, according to CBS.
Anthony Lewis, a married gay man, told the network: “It feels like we’re in a world where there’s one step forward with progress and then two steps back.
“Our marriage is no different than anyone else’s. Good times, bad times. Highs and lows. It’s just two people who happen to meet and fall madly in love with each other and want to spend the rest of our life together, and the fact that we’re two men doesn’t take away from that at all.”
Davis, who served as Rowan County Clerk until 2018, was briefly jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses on religious grounds.
She appealed to the Supreme Court in late July, challenging lower federal court rulings that held her liable for $100,000 in damages and $260,000 in attorneys' fees in a legal battle with one of the couples whose marriage she had declined to certify.
“If ever there was a case of exceptional importance, the first individual in the republic’s history who was jailed for following her religious convictions regarding the historic definition of marriage, this should be it,” her petition read.
The couple who sued Davis, David Ermold and David Moore, argued in August that the court should decline to hear the case.
"Not a single judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals showed any interest in Davis’s rehearing petition, and we are confident the Supreme Court will likewise agree that Davis’s arguments do not merit further attention,” their attorney William Powell said in a statement.
In her appeal, Davis, supported by the religious advocacy group Liberty Counsel, argued the First Amendment’s free exercise protections should shield her from liability, and that the Supreme Court’s 2015 same-sex marriage decision in Obergefell v Hodges is based on a “legal fiction.”
The 2015 decision, combined with a proclamation shortly after from then-Kentucky governor Steve Beshear to recognize same-sex marriages, left Davis as a “defenseless constitutional orphan,” per the appeal, who “stands before the court solely as an individual – stripped of any government immunity, a consequence that began with this court’s Obergefell opinion.”
Though more than two-thirds of Americans support same-sex marriage, the appeal comes at a time when conservative groups and states are pushing to roll back the protections from Obergefell.
As of this year, at least nine states have legislation aiming to block new licenses for gay marriages or resolutions urging the Supreme Court to overturn the 2015 ruling.
If the court does decide to take Davis’s case and does subsequently reverse Obergefell, responsibility for marriage law would revert to the states.
But both states and the federal government would still be required to recognize marriages from states where same-sex marriage is legal under the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act.
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