Our Votes, Our Marriages, Our Rights
- Kal Inois
- 7 days ago
- 10 min read
The LGBTQ+ community has spent decades fighting for the right to exist openly, to love freely, and to marry the person they choose, not as a privilege extended by the goodwill of politicians, but as a constitutional right recognized by the highest court in the land. That fight, which many believed had been won, is now entering what may be its most dangerous and consequential chapter yet, and the threat is not coming from the margins of American politics but from its very center, from a Supreme Court that has already shown us, in the starkest possible terms, exactly what it is willing to do when given the opportunity.
What happened to voting rights last week was not an isolated event. It was a continuation of a documented pattern, and the LGBTQ+ community, along with every American who believes in constitutional equality, needs to understand that pattern clearly and urgently, because the next chapter is already being written.
A Familiar Playbook
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many people who had spent years warning that abortion rights were in danger were told they were being alarmist. When Justice Clarence Thomas issued his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, explicitly calling for the Court to revisit Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell — the rulings protecting contraception, same-sex relationships, and marriage equality — those same people were told not to panic, that the Court would never go that far, that marriage equality was settled law.
One week ago, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, the last meaningful federal protection preventing states from drawing congressional maps designed to strip Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American voters of their political power. The ruling was decided along pure partisan lines, with all six conservative justices voting to gut it and all three liberal justices dissenting in terms that Justice Elena Kagan described as the "now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act."
The two justices who wrote and championed that decision are the same two justices who have already told us, in writing, that they want to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges. Justice Thomas said so explicitly in his Dobbs concurrence, and Justice Alito has repeatedly signaled the same. When Justices Thomas and Alito declined to hear the Kim Davis case in November 2025, they did not do so because they disagree with her goal. They issued a statement making clear they would like to overrule Obergefell but that the Davis petition did not present the question in a way they found useful. They are waiting for a better case. And the people who want to bring them one are already working on it.
Lead plaintiff Jim Obergefell himself said at the 10th anniversary of his landmark ruling that he "certainly never thought that at the 10th anniversary of marriage equality, I'd be worried about making it beyond 10 years." Yet here we are.
Organized, Funded, and Targeting Us
In late January 2026, a coalition of 47 right-wing organizations launched a coordinated campaign called "Greater Than" with a single stated goal: overturning Obergefell v. Hodges. The coalition includes Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, CatholicVote, and the Colson Center, and its express purpose is to reshape public opinion, mobilize Christian churches, and ultimately place a more carefully constructed legal challenge before the Supreme Court that Thomas and Alito will find compelling enough to act on.
What makes this coalition especially alarming is not just its size or its ambition, but its direct ties to the machinery already dismantling civil rights across the country. As the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism documented, five of the coalition's organizations are also partners in Prøject 2025, the 900-page Heritage Foundation playbook that serves as the †rump regime's governing manual. This is not a coincidence. Prøject 2025 explicitly calls for stripping "sexual orientation and gender identity" from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, and piece of legislation. The attack on LGBTQ+ rights is not a side effect of this regime's agenda. It is a central pillar of it.
The Greater Than campaign's messaging focuses on children, claiming that same-sex marriage has put "adult desires" over children's needs, a strategy that legal experts and advocates recognize immediately as a deliberate reframing designed to make discrimination sound like protection. Lambda Legal's Karen Loewy described the coalition plainly: "These are the same opponents of marriage equality that lost the first round. There's nothing about this coalition that is surprising. If you look at who is participating in it, they are the same people who have been funding the anti-marriage movement from the get-go."
In the first half of 2025, bills and resolutions were introduced in at least nine states challenging marriage equality, five urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell, and four proposing new "covenant marriage" categories limited to one man and one woman. The Southern Baptist Convention has set the reversal of Obergefell as a top organizational priority. And South Carolina Republicans introduced a resolution in April 2026 demanding the Supreme Court overturn marriage equality, just weeks after the Callais ruling eliminated the last major legal check on discriminatory state action.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned directly: "The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage. My prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion; they will send it back to the states. Anybody in a committed relationship in the LGBTQ community, you ought to consider getting married because I don't think they'll undo existing marriages, but I fear they will undo the national right."
The Real Cost of Losing Obergefell
Before dismissing that warning, it is worth being precise about what losing Obergefell would actually mean, because the specifics matter enormously and deserve to be stated plainly.
Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, a name that itself tells you something about how this country has always treated LGBTQ+ love as something that needed permission rather than recognition, and while it provides some protection by requiring the federal government and all states to recognize same-sex marriages that were lawfully performed, meaning existing marriages would not be dissolved, it does not require states to issue new marriage licenses to same-sex couples. If Obergefell falls, states with constitutional bans on same-sex marriage could immediately stop performing new same-sex marriages, creating a patchwork system in which couples in some states have full marriage rights and couples in others are locked out entirely.
Lambda Legal notes that anti-LGBTQ+ government actors are likely to test the boundaries of the Respect for Marriage Act, looking for ways to restrict marriage-related rights and benefits. The legal rights that come with marriage — inheritance, spousal benefits, hospital visitation, medical decision-making authority, joint tax filing, Social Security survivor benefits, parental recognition on birth certificates — could be challenged, eroded, or denied in states hostile to same-sex couples even if the marriages themselves remain technically recognized.
GLAAD documents that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear three additional LGBTQ+ cases in the 2025 to 2026 term, including challenges involving transgender athletes and conversion therapy, cases that signal the Court is not finished reshaping the legal landscape for LGBTQ+ Americans, and that the erosion of rights is happening not in one dramatic moment but in a series of deliberate, incremental rulings by the same six-justice conservative majority that just gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Missouri Under Attack
For Missouri's LGBTQ+ community, this is not an abstract national debate. It is a present and immediate reality, playing out in the state's courts, legislature, and constitution.
Missouri's own constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, passed by 71% of voters in 2004, has never been repealed and remains in the Missouri Constitution today. It was only rendered unenforceable by Obergefell. PROMO Missouri's Communications Director Robert Fischer stated it plainly: "Because marriage is defined in the Missouri Constitution as between one man and one woman, immediately, as soon as Obergefell falls, we will no longer have same-sex marriage equality within Missouri." No trigger law is needed. The ban is already written into the state's foundational document, waiting.
Axios Kansas City reported in July 2025 that Missouri is among the states where marriage equality would disappear immediately if Obergefell is overturned, with approximately 60% of LGBTQ+ adults nationally living in states where access to marriage would change. Missouri lawmakers have already introduced "covenant marriage" legislation in 2025, part of a national nine-state legislative push documented by NBC News.
The attack on Missouri's LGBTQ+ community extends far beyond marriage. Missouri is categorized as "High Priority to Achieve Basic Equality" by the Movement Advancement Project, the lowest possible ranking, with only one county out of 115 providing full nondiscrimination protections in employment, housing, and public accommodations. The Missouri Nondiscrimination Act, known as MONA, has been introduced in the Missouri legislature 22 times and has never passed, meaning LGBTQ+ Missourians can still be legally fired from their jobs, denied housing, refused banking services, and turned away from hospice care with no statewide legal recourse.
The Missouri House passed HB 1518, a bill that would allow any student organization on a college campus, including those receiving public funding, to refuse membership to LGBTQ+ students based on religious beliefs. The Human Rights Campaign called it what it is: a license to discriminate with taxpayer money.
A study cited by KCUR found that 48% of Missouri LGBTQ+ adults have considered leaving the state, and 32% of parents of LGBTQ+ children have considered moving their families elsewhere. Rob Connoley, a gay chef whose St. Louis restaurant Bulrush was a James Beard Award finalist, closed his thriving business and left Missouri after representing the state at an international food festival felt, in his own words, "egregious and awkward." "I couldn't be an ambassador for a state that was actively working against my own personal interests," he said.
A Partisan Court
The Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act last week is the same Court that would hear any future challenge to Obergefell, and understanding what that Court actually is — not what it is supposed to be, but what it demonstrably has become — is essential to understanding why the threat is as serious as it is.
Gallup polling shows that 75% of Democrats and 46% of independents believe the Court is too conservative, while 81% of Republicans trust it — the clearest possible evidence that the Court is no longer perceived, across the political spectrum, as a neutral institution. The Annenberg Public Policy Center found that more than half of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court, with public trust hitting its lowest point in nearly two decades.
Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury vacations, gifts, and private school tuition payments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars from Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, ruling on cases affecting Crow's interests without disclosing the gifts or recusing himself from the relevant decisions. Under current rules, nothing about that arrangement is technically illegal because the Supreme Court is the only court in the country without a binding ethics code. The Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act (S.1814), reintroduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, which would change that, has never been passed by a Senate controlled by the party protecting the justices it benefits most.
A Democratic Senate candidate in Maine has publicly called for the impeachment of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. We agree. Thomas accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a Republican mega-donor and continued ruling on cases affecting Crow's interests. That is corruption, and impeachment requires only a simple majority in the House. The question is whether Congress has the spine to use it.
Lambda Legal has warned explicitly that opponents of marriage equality are "unlikely to stop" and could be emboldened to bring a more carefully constructed case before this Court, particularly given that at least two sitting justices have already signaled in writing their willingness to overturn Obergefell when given the right opportunity.
Fighting Back Before May 3rd
The signature deadline for Missouri's two LGBTQ+ ballot initiatives is May 3, 2026 — two days from now. If you are in Missouri, this is the most urgent action you can take today.
MO for LGBTQ is circulating two petition initiatives for the November 2026 ballot. The first, Initiative 2026-18, would amend the Missouri Constitution to remove the provision defining marriage as between one man and one woman, replacing it with language stating that "the right to marry is a fundamental right for any two consenting adults." This is the direct constitutional protection that would prevent Missouri's ban from snapping back into effect if Obergefell is ever overturned. The second, Initiative 2026-19, would expand Missouri's anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, and marital status in employment, housing, and public accommodations — passing, finally, what MONA has failed to pass 22 times in the state legislature.
Beyond Missouri, here is where the broader fight needs your attention and your resources:
Demand SCOTUS Reform
Find your senators and find your House representative and contact them today. Demand they support H.R. 1074, the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act and S.1814, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act. Tell them you want their position on the record and that you will be sharing their answer.
Support the Organizations on the Front Lines
Lambda Legal — the nation's largest LGBTQ+ legal organization, actively preparing to fight any Obergefell challenge. Donate directly.
ACLU LGBTQ+ Rights Project — fighting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in 25+ states. Sign up for their state-level action alerts.
GLAAD — tracking every SCOTUS case affecting LGBTQ+ rights in the 2025 to 2026 term. Amplify their work.
Human Rights Campaign — fighting HB 1518 in Missouri and similar legislation across the country. Donate and advocate.
PROMO Missouri — Missouri's statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, on the ground in Jefferson City. Donate directly.
MO for LGBTQ — running the two ballot initiative campaigns. Donate, volunteer, and find petitions to sign before May 3rd.
Register and Vote
Register at vote.gov. It works in all 50 states and takes five minutes. The 2026 midterms, Missouri state legislative races, and attorney general contests are all part of this fight.
The LGBTQ+ community did not spend decades fighting for the right to love openly and marry freely only to lose it quietly to a Court that was engineered to take it away. And the rest of us — straight allies, parents, siblings, coworkers, neighbors, and anyone who believes that constitutional rights are not conditional gifts — did not come this far to look away when the most vulnerable among us are told that their marriages, their families, and their fundamental dignity are once again up for debate.
Missouri has a deadline of May 3rd, the country has a deadline of November 2026, and the LGBTQ+ community has been waiting long enough for the rest of us to show up.
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