Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, is the marriage equality ruling next?
Michael and Jacob clicked. They met online in 2020 (one lived in Pennsylvania, the other in Arizona), met in person in 2022 and by December they were a couple. They had talked of getting married in 2027, or 2028. There was no hurry.
Then came Election Day: Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. A few weeks later, Michael got a text from his partner: "We need to talk."
The upshot: Michael Tribbey and Jacob Rainey flew to Los Angeles for a rush wedding on Jan. 3. "We realized we need to get married before the new administration comes in, because we don't know what kind of shenanigans are going to come in with marriage equality,” Tribbey told the NorthJersey.com, which is a part of the Paste BN Network
Such concerns are on the minds of many as Pride Month 2025 gets underway. Could the federal recognition of gay marriage go away, just as the federal right to abortion did? Will protections against LGBTQ+ discriminations be lifted?
Those things haven't happened yet. They may not happen. There are laws in place, both at the state and national levels, to make it harder for them to happen.
But who could say, in light of the anti-DEI policies of the new administration, and the past actions of the Supreme Court, that they couldn't happen?'
"Some of it is unlikely, but I don't think any of it is impossible," said Rick Kavin, a political science teacher whose courses "Law and Politics" and "LGBTQ+ Politics in America" are offered at Rutgers University.
"It's way more likely than it was five years ago, that's for sure," he said. "I think anything's on the table at this point."
Gay married couples, this year, are worried about things that might have seemed fanciful just a year ago. And not without reason, said Brielle Winslow-Majette, deputy director of Garden State Equality, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group based in Montclair and Asbury Park, New Jersey.
"I think that's a valid concern," she said. "Based on things we've heard the Supreme Court say in the past, I think they're going after anything that's not traditional. I wouldn't be surprised if same-sex marriage was on the docket."
Which is why, as Pride Month launches with the usual parades, celebrations, festivals and music events, it is also looking nervously over its shoulder.
'There are things percolating'
The anti-DEI sentiments out of Washington are affecting Pride events on a national level. Mastercard, Pepsi, Nissan and PwC have pulled their sponsorship of NYC Pride. Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and Diageo pulled out of San Francisco Pride. Booz Allen Hamilton and Deloitte withdrew from WorldPride, Washington, D.C.
It all begs the question: Could Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, be simply overturned by the court's current 6-3 conservative majority, as Roe v. Wade was in 2022?
"I think there may be a try," Winslow-Majette said. "I don't think it is far-fetched to say that it could happen."
There are rumblings. Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who was successfully sued in 2015 by a same-sex couple to whom she denied a marriage license, plans to fight the $100,000 judgment in court. But her lawyers plan to go further. They want to make the case a judgment on Obergefell itself. Such a test-case – that, or another like it – could end up, sooner or later, in the Supreme Court.
Sounds unlikely? So did the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. Until it happened.
"There are things percolating," Kavin said. "You're probably going to see something just like that, where a county clerk refuses to issue a license, they're held in contempt and they sue, and it works its way up the courts."
'Scary, but real'
Some LGBTQ+ households are starting to ask themselves: What's your plan of action? What's your escape route? (Some, Kavin said, are talking of Canada). Others aren't as concerned.
And some couples, like Michael and Jacob, have rushed into matrimony while the door is still open. It would be easier, they reasoned, for the government to prevent their marriage than to un-marry them after the fact.
Still it was hard, Tribbey said, to have to suddenly alter their life plans, and to stage a hurried wedding without the preferred trappings, and without most of their respective families. "I found a small chapel that does wedding ceremonies in L.A.," Tribbey said. "I wanted something that was a little nice. I didn't just want a shoebox to be married in."
Perhaps, he said, they can have a more elaborate re-commitment ceremony in 2030 or so, when all of this has blown over. If it blows over.
Meanwhile, already-married gay couples shouldn't be complacent, Kavin said.
"For folks who are currently married, don't just rely on that marriage," he said. "Make sure your will is in order, that your health proxy is set up, that everything is clearly spelled out. What you would want if something happens to you, if you die, if you share children, particularly if they're adopted children? Have that in order. Have your documents in order. Which is scary, but real."
If a worst-case scenario is barreling down on the LGBTQ+ community, it will encounter speed bumps.
In New Jersey, for example, there is strong pro-equality language in the marriage statutes. "In 2022, they rewrote the marriage laws to be gender-neutral," Kavin said, "in anticipation that something might change on the federal level. New Jersey has very strong protections, but obviously many states don't."
Federally, the Respect for Marriage Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden, also in 2022, requires federal and state governments to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages, according to the laws of the state where the marriage occurred. Until that is overturned, all existing marriages will have to be recognized, nationwide.
But that wouldn't prevent new laws, forbidding new marriages.
"While I don't think you would see existing marriages voided, it's very, very possible that you would see the end of the licensing of new marriages," Kavin said.
Moreover, federal laws can be annulled. The Dobbs decision, reversing Roe v. Wade, was one example.
The majority 2022 opinion on Dobbs pronounced that its legal argument was confined specifically to abortion. But in his separate, "concurrent" opinion, justice Clarence Thomas argued that, on the contrary, it ought to be applied more broadly.
"He specifically singled out not only Obergefell, which is the marriage case, but also Lawrence v. Texas from 2003, which is the sodomy case," Kavin said. "So he's specifically citing these examples of cases that should be reexamined."
Whether such a thing happens may depend not just on the vigor of conservatives in pursuing the case, but also, conversely, on the public's willingness to push back.