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Transcript:
Hey, remember Kim Davis? She’s the Kentucky county clerk who made national headlines in 2015 for refusing to do her job and issue marriage licenses to people who wanted to get married, claiming that her bigoted religious beliefs were more important than a Supreme Court decision declaring that two adults of the same sex can, in fact, get married if they want to. She turned away a number of same sex couples who wanted to get married, before six of those couples decided to be fucking heroes and sue her ass. They won, she had to pay $100,000 and go to jail for while, and there’s been a lot of messy legal back and forth since then, including a man who is on Davis’s side suing her for refusing to let him marry his laptop computer to make some kind of point about how gay people are inanimate objects. Also last year she had to pay the same sex couples another quarter of a million dollars.
The circus also included glimpses into Davis’s personal life, revealing that her religious beliefs value marriage so completely that she’s had four of them to three different men. She has “two daughters from her first marriage and twins, a son and another daughter, who were born five months after her divorce from her first husband. Her third husband is the biological father of the twins, the children being conceived while Davis was still married to her first husband. The twins were adopted by Davis’s current husband, Joe Davis, who was also her second husband; the couple initially divorced in 2006 but later remarried.” It truly is sacred, isn’t it?
Anyway, it’s been ten years and I’m sorry to inform you that not only is Davis still alive, but she’s also back in the news thanks to her latest lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court asking for them to vindicate her at long last by overturning the original ruling that she violated: Obergefell v. Hodges, which finally gave same sex couples the same rights as heteros to get married.
Let me start by pointing out that MANY if not MOST constitutional law experts, OF WHICH I AM NOT ONE, are very doubtful that this suit will go anywhere. I know this is becoming less and less of a norm in society but on THIS channel, we respect the consensus of experts, god dammit. Here are some reasons I’ve seen given by some of those experts: an attorney who helped win the initial case against Davis told The Hill that SCOTUS is “unlikely” to take the case due to the fact that “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.”
And that’s true! Back in March, an appeals court ruled that Davis “cannot raise the First Amendment as a defense because she is being held liable for state action, which the First Amendment does not protect.”
Other experts point out that in addition to Davis’s ridiculousness, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavenaugh and Amy Coney Barrett don’t seem that invested in overturning same sex marriage, so maybe they wouldn’t even have the votes.
I’ve seen other experts, like Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis, argue that this case will fail because “Unlike abortion, marriage opponents don’t have the same social movement that anti-abortion forces did, which was core to the GOP.”
It’s much more difficult to be reassured by arguments like that, considering that is clearly factually incorrect. On your screen right now, I will show you the social movement that anti-abortion forces had when Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. On the left, I will show you the social movement that same sex marriage opponents have now.
In the summer of 2022, Pew Research found that 62% of Americans said that “abortion should be legal in all or most cases.” Later that year, another Pew survey found that 61% of Americans felt that “legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society.” Wow, that’s actually 1% less, but basically a rounding error. Let’s just say that for both abortion and same sex marriage, the majority of Americans agree that they are good things.
And on the other side, that 30-40% of haters? They’re the exact same people! The Venn diagram is a circle! They are misogynistic, homophobic, and also racist bigots, many of whom use their fundamentalist Christian religion as an excuse to act on that bigotry. The Religious Right has spent decades using “religious freedom” to try to protect pharmacists who want to deny women birth control and doctors who want to deny women abortions, as well as bakers who want to deny gay people wedding cakes and county clerks who want to deny gay people the actual right to marry. Anyone who thinks that these are separate movements, and that one is more powerful than the other, isn’t paying attention to the point that I can only assume they’ve just come out of cryostasis after accidentally tripping into a freezer in 1920. On another planet. Inhabited exclusively by dumbasses.
Like I said, I like to trust the expert consensus, so I will be cautiously optimistic that the hateful theocrats who run the Supreme Court realize that they will look like clowns by even taking the case of this fiveheaded hypocritical lolcow who obviously doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But at the same time, I will not be surprised if the same court that has destroyed women’s right to healthcare, allowed Trump to banish people to other countries they aren’t from, and granted Trump immunity to do whatever he wants in office with no consequence, I won’t be surprised if after all of that they decide that there’s nothing they can do that will result in any kind of meaningful consequence, either.
And so even if the Court does choose to ignore Davis’s case, I will continue to be on alert because the Religious Right is absolutely coming for marriage equality. And when I say that, I don’t just mean equality based upon sexuality. If they manage to overturn Obergefell, and it honestly seems like they are going to, they will absolutely come for interracial marriage eventually.
“But Rebecca,” you’re rushing to type in the comments, “THAT will never happen because one of the Supreme Court justices purchased by the Religious Rights to make these decisions, Clarence Thomas, is HIMSELF in an interracial marriage!”
Two points on that: first, some people argue that existing marriages will not be affected by the Supreme Court decision thanks to Congress passing the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022. Hypothetically, a Supreme Court overturning Obergefell and even Loving would only ruin the lives of people who want to get married in the future, and fuck those people. Clarence Thomas already got his, which leads to my second point: these laws do not matter to the ultra wealthy. Do you have any idea how many abortions have been bought by wealthy “anti-abortion” Republicans like Donald Trump? We do not live in the same universe as these assholes. They will simply fly to New Zealand to get their abortions, or marry their gay lover, or hide out in a bunker while the apocalypse rains down upon us poors. I do not doubt for a single second that if Harlan Crow–not the bad guy from Justified, I’m talking about the billionaire who owns Clarence Thomas–if Harlan Crow told Clarence Thomas to pass a judgment that made it legal to shoot any black man on sight, he would do it on his way to that makeup room where they turned Eddie Murphy into a white guy. But he has to hurry, because I bet there’s good life insurance on him and so the second Ginni hears the news, she’s loading that gun.
