From the moment the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that the right of same-sex couples to marry was guaranteed by the Constitution, right-wing anti-LGBTQ activists have insisted that the ruling is illegitimate and must be overturned. Their effort to bring that about kicked into high gear after President Donald Trump used his first term in office to fill the Supreme Court with far-right ideologues who subsequently overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
For nearly a decade now, right-wing activists have been plotting to get cases before the Supreme Court that the court's right-wing justices can use to overturn its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, and appearing on a World Prayer Network call Wednesday night, religious-right attorney Mat Staver declared that the time is now "ripe" for that to happen.
"There is no so-called constitutional right in the Constitution to same-sex marriage. That's ridiculous," Staver said. "Obergefell will be overturned. It's not an if, it's just a matter of when."
Along the same lines, Christian nationalist Oklahoma state Sen. David Bullard appeared on "Jenna Ellis In The Morning" on Thursday to discuss a bill he has introduced to provide tax credits to married couples who have "natural" children.
This bill was written explicitly to exclude LGBTQ couples, which Bullard explained is designed to "push back on Obergefell."
"The reality is we have to push back on Obergefell," Bullard said. "If we wait too long on that Obergefell ruling to start actually sending things back up and challenging that stance that somehow we have to all get along and say that same-sex marriage is okay, it's going to be too late at some point for us to push back."
"So, really what we want to do is challenge that concept and see if we can get to Obergefell," Bullard added. "And I think that's kind of what we're pushing at all the way around the board with a bill like this is to actually go straight at Obergefell and say, 'No, the Constitution protects my right, my freedom of speech, my freedom of expression, my freedom of religion to disagree with same-sex marriage.' And we can do that by moving ourselves to a point where we create fairness amongst God's design for traditional marriage in bills kind of similar to what we're talking about here."
