How Obergefell v. Hodges Made Marriage Equality the Law Everywhere

On the morning of Friday, June 26, 2015, Justice Anthony Kennedy began reading from the bench in a case named for a man from Cincinnati and the director of the Ohio Department of Health. Outside, crowds on the plaza held signs and waited for the runners who bring paper copies down the steps. The case had started with a death certificate. Jim Obergefell had married his partner of more than twenty years, John Arthur, in 2013, in a medical plane parked on the tarmac at an airport in Maryland, because Arthur was dying of ALS, could barely travel, and Ohio would not marry them. When Arthur died, Ohio would not list Obergefell as his husband. By the time Kennedy finished reading, same-sex couples could marry in every state, and the people on the plaza were crying and singing.

In short: Obergefell v. Hodges held, 5-4, that the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license marriages between two people of the same sex and to recognize such marriages performed elsewhere. It rests on both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, and its future depends less on its own reasoning than on whether the Court keeps treating long-settled precedents as settled.

The couples behind the caption

Supreme Court cases carry one name, but Obergefell was really four cases from four states bundled together: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. Each had a different set of plaintiffs and a slightly different question.

In Michigan, two nurses, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, were raising children they had adopted separately, because Michigan law would not let an unmarried couple adopt jointly. They sued first over adoption and ended up challenging the state's marriage ban itself. In Tennessee, a group of couples who had married elsewhere, including a soldier and his husband and two veterinary professors, wanted the state to recognize their marriages. In Kentucky, couples sought both licenses and recognition. In Ohio, the cases were about death certificates and birth certificates: whose name the state would print on the official record of a life.

Those details matter because they show what marriage actually is in law. It is not just a ceremony. It is a bundle of hundreds of legal consequences: who can make medical decisions, who inherits, who appears on a child's birth certificate, who gets survivor benefits, who is next of kin. Each plaintiff had run into a specific wall in that bundle.

How the case got to the Court

By 2014, the law was moving fast. The Supreme Court had struck down the core of the federal Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor in 2013, ruling that the federal government could not refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that states had allowed. After Windsor, federal courts around the country began striking down state marriage bans one after another. Many states had marriage equality by court order; others had adopted it by legislation or, in a few cases, at the ballot box.

Then the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which covers Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, went the other way. In late 2014, in an opinion by Judge Jeffrey Sutton, it upheld the four states' bans. Sutton's reasoning was not hostile in tone. He argued that the question belonged to voters and legislatures, that the democratic process was already moving toward recognition, and that federal judges should not cut it short. That decision created a split among the federal appeals courts, which is the classic reason the Supreme Court steps in. It agreed to hear the cases in January 2015, and arguments were heard in late April.

The reasoning: two clauses working together

Kennedy's majority opinion, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, rests on the Fourteenth Amendment, which says no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The Due Process part of the argument goes like this. The Court has long held that the word "liberty" protects certain personal choices central to dignity and autonomy, and it had recognized marriage as one of them many times, including in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which struck down bans on interracial marriage. Kennedy identified four reasons the right to marry is fundamental: choices about marriage are central to individual autonomy; marriage supports a two-person union unlike any other; it safeguards children and families; and it is a keystone of the social order, which the government itself recognizes by attaching so many benefits to it. Each of those reasons, he wrote, applies equally to same-sex couples.

The Equal Protection part is shorter but just as important. Denying same-sex couples the right that everyone else has, and all the benefits that come with it, imposes a disability on gay and lesbian people and treats them unequally. Kennedy wrote that the two clauses are connected and that each can shed light on the other. He did not decide which level of scrutiny applies to laws that classify by sexual orientation, a question the Court has still not squarely answered.

The opinion also took on the method question directly. The states argued that a fundamental right had to be "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" and described narrowly, citing a 1997 case about assisted suicide, Washington v. Glucksberg. Kennedy answered that the Court had never defined the right to marry that way in earlier cases, and that the nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The opinion closes with the couples themselves. "They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law," Kennedy wrote. "The Constitution grants them that right."

The dissents, taken seriously

All four dissenting justices wrote separately, which is unusual and a sign of how strongly they felt.

Chief Justice John Roberts made the democratic-process argument most fully. His point was not that same-sex marriage is bad policy; he said clearly that there were strong arguments for it. His point was that the Constitution does not answer the question, that the people were deciding it state by state, and that taking it away from them would leave opponents feeling cheated and would damage the Court's legitimacy. He also warned that the majority's reasoning could reach other marriage restrictions, such as limits on plural marriage.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in characteristically sharp language, called the decision a threat to democracy and attacked the majority's style. Justice Clarence Thomas argued that "liberty" in the Due Process Clause means freedom from physical restraint and government interference, not entitlement to government benefits, and that the state cannot give or take away human dignity. Justice Samuel Alito warned that the decision would be used to label people with traditional religious views about marriage as bigots, and that they would face pressure for those beliefs.

Here is my view of the strongest of these arguments. Roberts's case for letting democracy work is serious, and it was not obviously wrong as a prediction: public support was rising rapidly. But fundamental rights are precisely the ones the Constitution does not leave to majority vote, and couples who were aging, sick or raising children did not have the luxury of waiting for the last state legislature to come around. Jim Obergefell's husband was already dead. The cost of patience fell entirely on the people being asked to be patient.

Alito's concern about religious liberty has proven to be a live question in the years since, in cases about wedding vendors and website designers, and the Court has often sided with religious objectors in those disputes. A fair reading is that Obergefell guarantees access to civil marriage; it does not require any religion to perform or bless a wedding, and Kennedy said so explicitly.

What the ruling still rests on

The question people have asked most since 2022 is whether Obergefell could fall. The reason they ask is Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 decision that overruled Roe v. Wade. Dobbs used exactly the history-and-tradition test that Kennedy had rejected, and Justice Thomas wrote a concurrence saying the Court should reconsider other substantive due process precedents, naming Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas among them. The Dobbs majority, written by Alito, said its reasoning did not threaten those other decisions, because abortion was unique in involving what the Court described as potential life.

So here is where things stand. Obergefell has its Equal Protection leg as well as its Due Process leg, which makes it a different case from Roe. Hundreds of thousands of couples have married in reliance on it, and the Court's own doctrine of stare decisis gives heavy weight to reliance interests. In November 2025, the Court declined to hear a petition from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who had refused to issue marriage licenses after the ruling, that had asked the justices to reconsider Obergefell. Declining a petition is not a ruling on the merits, but it was widely read as a sign that a majority had no appetite to revisit the question.

Congress also built a backstop. The Respect for Marriage Act, signed by President Biden in December 2022, repealed the Defense of Marriage Act and requires the federal government and every state to recognize marriages that were valid where they were performed. It passed with votes from members of both parties, a rare example of a bipartisan civil rights bill in a polarized decade. What it does not do is force a state to issue licenses to same-sex couples if Obergefell were ever overturned. Many states still have marriage bans on their books, inactive since 2015, and some would spring back to life in that scenario.

The quiet effect: a decade of marriages

The most important consequence of Obergefell may be the least dramatic. In the years since 2015, same-sex couples have married, had and adopted children, bought homes together, inherited from each other, and grown old together. Survey research has found public support for same-sex marriage rising to a large majority, including a substantial share of Republicans, though support among Republicans has softened somewhat in recent polling.

That shift came from contact as much as argument. People who opposed same-sex marriage in 2004 learned that their nephew, their coworker, their pastor's daughter was gay. When the law treated those families as families, the ordinary routines of life, the school pickup, the hospital visit, the wedding invitation, did the rest. A good deal of political change works this way. The law sets a floor, and then the lived experience on top of it changes minds.

The road from a one-line dismissal

Obergefell was the end of a long road, and the road began with a case the Supreme Court barely bothered to look at.

In 1970, two men in Minneapolis, Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license and were refused. They sued. The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled against them, and when they appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 dismissed the case in a single sentence, "for want of a substantial federal question." For decades, lower courts treated that dismissal, Baker v. Nelson, as a binding signal that the Constitution had nothing to say about same-sex marriage. In Obergefell, the Court expressly overruled it.

In between came a series of moves and countermoves. In 1993 the Hawaii Supreme Court suggested, in a case called Baehr v. Lewin, that the state's refusal to marry same-sex couples might violate its own constitution's ban on sex discrimination. The reaction was swift. In 1996 Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, and President Bill Clinton signed it, defining marriage for federal purposes as between a man and a woman and allowing states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from elsewhere. Hawaii's voters amended their constitution in 1998 to let the legislature reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Then Massachusetts changed everything. In November 2003, in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the state's highest court held that its constitution required marriage equality, and the first legal same-sex marriages in the country took place there in May 2004. The backlash was immediate: in November 2004, voters in eleven states approved constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. In 2008 California's Supreme Court recognized marriage equality, and that November voters passed Proposition 8 to reverse it. Advocates lost far more often than they won at the ballot box until 2012, when voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington approved marriage equality and Minnesota voters rejected a ban.

The lesson here is not that courts did all the work. It is that courts, legislatures, ballot campaigns and millions of private conversations moved together, sometimes in opposite directions, until the country reached a point where the Court's ruling confirmed something a majority had already come to accept. Advocates also made strategic choices along the way: which states to sue in, which plaintiffs to put forward, when to go to federal court and when to hold back. Some of those choices were contested at the time, and some looked like mistakes until they did not.

What you can do

Marriage equality is national law, but it rests on choices that real people keep making. Here is where to put some energy.

• Track the Court yourself. Court watch carries this term's Supreme Court opinions with the Court's own one-line summaries, its emergency docket and Senate votes on judges, so you can see what the justices are actually deciding instead of relying on rumours.
• Check your state's books. Many states never repealed their old marriage bans. Find out whether yours did, then use find your representatives to tell your state legislators whether you want the dead language cleared out.
• See which bills crossed party lines. The Respect for Marriage Act passed with votes from both parties. The common ground page lists bills both parties passed together, which is a useful reminder of what is possible.
• Follow the wider story. The LGBTQ rights topic page gathers reporting on marriage, family law and the cases that test religious-liberty claims against anti-discrimination laws.
• Talk about your family. If you are part of a same-sex couple, or love someone who is, the most persuasive thing you can do is be ordinary in public. Bring the photo to work. That is how the majority got built.