2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she believes the Supreme Court is poised to overturn its landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and that unmarried same-sex couples “ought to consider” tying the knot.
“American voters, and to some extent the American media, don’t understand how many years the Republicans have been working in order to get us to this point,” Clinton told Fox News host Jessica Tarlov on Friday in a wide-ranging interview on “Raging Moderates,” the podcast Tarlov co-hosts with Scott Galloway.
“It took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Clinton said. “The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage; my prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion — they will send it back to the states.”
“Anybody in a committed relationship out there in the LGBTQ community, you ought to consider getting married because I don’t think they’ll undo existing marriages, but I fear they will undo the national right,” she said.
In July, Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who was briefly jailed in 2015 for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, formally asked the Supreme Court to revisit its Obergefell decision, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in June. The justices have not yet said whether they will take up the case.
If Obergefell were overturned, same-sex marriage rights would still be protected by the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan measure signed by former President Biden in 2022 that requires all states and the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal. “Zombie laws” against marriage equality in more than half the nation are unenforceable because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell.
The Respect for Marriage Act, introduced after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said the court “should reconsider” decisions including Obergefell after overturning the federal right to abortion, prevents state statutes and constitutional amendments banning gay marriage from being enforced on already married couples, but it does not render them entirely obsolete.
In addition to Thomas, Justice Samuel Alito has also voiced opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell, to which he and Thomas dissented in 2015. Last winter, in a five-page statement explaining the court’s decision not to involve itself in a dispute between the Missouri Department of Corrections and jurors dismissed for disapproving of same-sex marriage on religious grounds, Alito wrote that the conflict “exemplifies the danger” he had long anticipated would come from the ruling.
“Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government,” he wrote.
Public support for marriage equality remains at historic highs, though a May Gallup poll showed support among Republicans slipping to 41 percent, the lowest in a decade. In a separate survey conducted by a trio of polling firms in June, 56 percent of Republican respondents said they support same-sex marriage rights.
