Supreme Court denies former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis' attempt to overturn gay marriage

Alex Acquisto, Lexington Herald-Leader on Nov 10, 2025

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The Supreme Court has again denied a petition to overturn the right to gay marriage filed by Kim Davis, the embattled former Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples and has spent the last decade petitioning courts to grant her relief.

“The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied,” justices wrote in their Monday order, dealing a blow to Davis and conservative Christian allies nationally, including Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based Christian legal firm that has defended her since 2015.

This is the second time the Supreme Court has rejected a request from Davis to hear her case.

The high court legalized gay marriage in 2015 in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. But Davis, a clerk in Rowan County at the time, refused to issue licenses to gay couples, citing her Christian conservative beliefs.

“For me, this would be an act of disobedience to God,” she told reporters at the time.

Davis’ defense before the Supreme Court, which conferenced Friday to decide whether to formally hear her case, was her First Amendment right to free speech, which includes the exercise of religion — a right Davis’ attorneys have long said she was denied and then punished for exercising.

In the months after Obergefell was decided and Davis remained staunch in her refusal to follow the new law, she was sued by a handful of gay couples, held in contempt by a federal judge, and jailed for six days for refusing to heed a judge’s order that she issue those marriage licenses. A lawsuit filed by one of the gay couples, David Moore and David Ermold, has dragged out for more than a decade.

Characterizing her as the “first victim of Obergefell,” Davis’ attorneys have tried to use the punishment Davis endured for not issuing gay marriage licenses as a way to challenge the Obergefell decision, overall, claiming it unconstitutionally infringed on her right to religious freedom and exercise. And that religious exercise, along with qualified immunity, should have lawfully protected her from penalty when she refused to legitimize legal unions between gay couples, her attorneys argued.

But legal experts have said using Davis’ case to overturn the federal right for gay couples to marry was a long shot. As a government employee, she was bound by statute to issue those marriage licenses — a reality that trumps her individual exercise of religion in this context, they’ve said.

Lawyers for Ermold and Moore echoed that logic, writing in an Oct. 8 brief to the high court that Davis’ argument “boils down to a single issue: whether government officials may assert their private First Amendment rights as a defense to liability for their official actions taken on behalf of the State.”

Bill Powell, one of the attorneys for the couple, celebrated the high court’s ruling Monday.

“The Supreme Court’s denial of review confirms what we already knew: same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and Kim Davis’s denial of marriage licenses in defiance of Obergefell plainly violated that right,” Powell said in a statement.

“This is a win for same-sex couples everywhere who have built their families and lives around the right to marry,” he added.

Davis, who lost reelection in 2018, has been ordered by a judge and a jury over the years to pay more than $360,000 in damages to Ermold and Moore. Her appeal of a judge’s order requiring her to pay those damages is the case the Supreme Court rejected Monday.

“Davis was jailed, hauled before a jury, and now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings,” Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver said in a statement Monday, vowing to continue fighting to overturn Obergefell.

“By denying this petition, the high court has let stand a decision to strip a government defendant of their immunity and any personal First Amendment defense for their religious expression,” he added. “Obergefell was egregiously wrong from the start. This opinion has no basis in the Constitution ... it is not a matter of if, but when the Supreme Court will overturn Obergefell.”

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