I was one of the lawyers who helped win marriage equality and yes, the GOP can take it away.
In late 2016 I published an op-ed entitled “Trump and LGBTQ rights: Your worst nightmares unlikely to come true.” The premise of the piece was basically what you’d expect from the title. People were freaking out about Trump and his cronies reversing the progress made in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights, and I wanted to allay those fears. In particular, people were asking me (a lot) about whether Trump could “undo” the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges — the 2015 decision that recognized same-sex marriages in all fifty states.
“Hold on,” you say. “Why would anyone care what you think? Aren’t you just some middle-aged shitposter who tricked a law school into hiring you?” Yes, but I was also lead counsel for the Kentucky plaintiffs in Obergefell. Seriously! There’s a whole movie about it. Here’s the brief we filed:
After the win at SCOTUS, my partners and I litigated the infamous Kim Davis case (that’s the one where a county clerk in Kentucky stopped issuing marriage licenses after Obergefell), and won pretty much every step of the way. Those victories led people, including me, to assume I knew something…
