Marriage Equality Icon Jim Obergefell Warns that Perils Persist for LGBTQ+ Families

The right for same-sex families to wed has been a reality nationwide for a decade, but now is not the time for complacency, warns Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff in the historic court case that secured marriage equality, NBC News reported.

Obergefell himself certainly is not resting on his laurels. "Ten years later, I certainly wasn't expecting to be talking about the threats to marriage equality, the potential for Obergefell to be overturned," he told NBC News, citing the historic Supreme Court finding that bears his name.

Obergefell pointed to the Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization as a precedent for what the majority right-wing Court might do. With that ruling, the Court discarded the notion of stare decisis and rolled back its own 1973 finding in Roe v. Wade after half a century, ending the Constitutional right of women to choose for themselves whether or not to continue carrying a pregnancy.

"For 49 years, people grew up with that right [to abortion], and then with the proverbial stroke of a pen on that decision, that right was taken away," Obergefell told NBC News. "We have to learn from that."

Obergefell's warnings carry a sense of prescience, given the signals the Court has sent out. Starting in the early 2000s queer Americans saw steady progress in a series of Court rulings that brought them closer to legal parity with their straight countrymen. That string of victories culminated in the 2015 ruling that swept away state laws, and even constitutional amendments, barring gay and lesbian couples from participating in full civil matrimony.

Even at the time, however, the Court's more conservative members gave strident voice to their disagreement on the fundamental right of queer people to formalize their long-term commitments. Justice Samuel Alito offered the dubious rationale that a ban on same-sex marriage equality ought to have remained in place because otherwise "Americans who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds could be labeled as bigots," NBC News recalled.

Alito did not offer a reason why interracial marriages like those of his colleague Justice Clarence Thomas – also condemned by some on religious grounds – should remain legal if a fear of someone being called a "bigot" is sufficient grounds to deprive an entire class of people of their fundamental rights.

Thomas himself suggested when Roe was reversed that the Court ought to revisit other contentious issues, including marriage equality and the right of heterosexual married couples to freely access methods of birth control.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-written document that runs more than 900 pages and lays out a program of revoking rights for minorities, eroding legal equality for LGBTQ+ Americans, and outlawing currently legal expressions like explicit adult content, has seemingly been used by the Trump administration as a blueprint for legislative and judicial action, and the GOP seems to be falling over itself to fulfill the document's instructions.

"Over the past several months, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states have introduced measures aimed at undermining same-sex marriage rights," NBC News noted. "These measures, many of which were crafted with the help of the anti-marriage equality group MassResistance, seek to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell."

Since the Court cannot address a legal issue until a legal case involving that issue is brought before it, the strategy of the political right is to pass Constitutionally dubious legislation likely to trigger lawsuits in the hope that sooner or later one of those suits will come before the Court, and the Court can then potentially snatch marriage equality away as it did with women's reproductive rights in overturning Roe.

Even though the federal Respect for Marriage Act was signed into law in 2022 after the Court rescinded women's reproductive rights, a Court ruling that overturns Obergefell would impact America's same-sex families. The stated goal of right-wing anti-marriage forces is to return questions of whether same-sex families may marry to the states – much as so-called "anti-miscegenation" laws banning interracial marriage once were a matter of state (rather than federal) laws until the Supreme Court struck those laws down with its 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia.

Jim Obergefell challenged that stance. "Marriage is a right, and it shouldn't depend on where you live," he told NBC News. "Why is queer marriage any different than interracial marriage or any other marriage?"

To watch the NBC news clip, follow this link.