Supreme Court's silence on gay marriage speaks volumes [View all]
By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion
The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case brought in an effort to persuade the justices to reconsider the court’s landmark 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges.
This latest decision is best read as a signal that the conservative majority has little interest in revisiting gay marriage, despite the call issued by Justice Clarence Thomas in the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. The conservative constitutional revolution at the Supreme Court remains underway, but it is now possible to say with some confidence that gay marriage — and gay rights more broadly — are not among the revolution’s targets.
Fears that the court’s activist conservatives might be coming for same-sex marriage stemmed from the fact that the Dobbs decision overruled two abortion-rights decisions, Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which were important parts of the doctrinal foundation on which Obergefell was built.
“Doctrine” in constitutional law refers to the chains of reasoning that gradually accumulate in each case the court recognizes as precedent. You can think of each significant case in a line of precedent as a block in a Jenga tower. When the court overrules an important precedent, it pulls that block out of the tower. The tower becomes less structurally sound; and it isn’t implausible to wonder whether the whole thing might collapse.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-supreme-courts-silence-on-gay-marriage-speaks-volumes/
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