Hear ye, hear ye. Gather round, folks. I’ve got an important pronouncement to make:
Kim Davis can fuck all the way off!
I know, I know. That’s not very nice. But it’s a hell of a lot nicer than what she wanted to do to me: invalidate and take away my marriage.
For those of you who have blissfully forgotten, Davis was a county clerk in Kentucky who responded to the Supreme Court’s momentous Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, citing “God’s authority.” You know, the opposite of what she was legally required to do.
The couple she refused a marriage license to, David Moore and David Ermold, sued Davis and were eventually awarded $50,000 each plus even more in attorney fees, leaving Davis on the hook for $360,000 (attorneys make the big bucks).
Davis got mad for and stayed mad for nine years until bringing her appeal before the Supreme Court asking them to somehow use the case she lost as a way to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges entirely.
The Supreme Court told her to go f…. OK, OK. They didn’t tell her anything, but they did refuse to hear the case, no reason given. The next best thing! That means that marriage equality is safe for another day!
Not safe for good, mind you. There is a solid right-wing majority on the Supreme Court right now. Justice Clarence Thomas said himself when he helped overturn Roe v Wade that Obergefell v. Hodges was in his sights. It wasn’t that they don’t want to undo marriage equality. It’s that they looked at Davis’s case and said, “Oh, hell no. Not this messy bitch coming in here trying to ungay America!”
But we will take good news when and where we can get it!
And lest you think the Supreme Court has gone woke, earlier this month they took another swing at transgender people, upholding a passport policy that serves one purpose: to hurt trans people.
“The State Department policy requires passport holders to use their sex assigned at birth as their sex designation, prohibiting transgender people from matching it with their gender identity,” explains the Hill. “The policy also removed the option for people to select ‘X,’ leaving male and female as the only two options.”
While you can easily imagine why this might pose a very big problem for transgender people, whoever wrote the unsigned majority opinion could not: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth — in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
Major white-person-saying-I-don’t-see-color energy in this opinion. Someone’s sex at birth may be “a historical fact,” but it isn’t an innocuous one. Anti-trans bias is real (as this opinion makes clear) as is anti-trans violence. Forcing a trans person to come out to every person who needs to see their passport puts them in continuous danger.
The three justices who believe that transgender people are human signed a dissenting opinion written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that reads, in part:
“The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect. The Court nonetheless fails to spill any ink considering the plaintiffs, opting instead to intervene in the Government’s favor without equitable justification, and in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party. Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern. So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded. This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification. Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent.”
In other words, these three justices told the majority that they were sadistic assholes pretending to be victims who were so full of shit and bad at their jobs that they shouldn’t even be justices. And Justices Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan weren’t too chickenshit to sign their opinion, unlike the majority. Also Ketanji Brown Jackson is fire.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of the Supreme Court is made up of people who not only will harm LGBTQ+ people (almost) every chance they get, but who will delight in doing so.
