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The Supreme Court has rejected a bid to overturn a landmark ruling on same-sex marriage.
On Monday (November 10), the nation's highest court declined to revisit its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage, effectively rejecting an appeal from former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, per HuffPost.
The justices denied Davis’s petition without comment, leaving in place a lower court order requiring her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to two couples she denied marriage licenses while serving as clerk of Rowan County.
Davis’ legal team had urged the court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark decision that established marriage equality as a constitutional right. Her attorneys repeatedly cited statements from Justice Clarence Thomas, who has previously argued that the ruling should be reconsidered.
Thomas, along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, dissented in the 2015 case. Roberts hadn't publicly revisited the issue since then, while Alito had repeatedly criticized Obergefell before recently saying he wasn't calling for it to be overturned.
Davis, who cited her Christian faith in refusing to issue the licenses, became a national figure in 2015 when she defied court orders and was briefly jailed for contempt. After her release, deputies issued the licenses without Davis' name on them, a change later codified by the Kentucky legislature, which removed all clerks’ names from marriage licenses statewide. Davis lost her bid for reelection in 2018.
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