Justice Thomas and Justice Alito added that the Obergefell ruling “enables courts and governments” to label believers in traditional marriage “as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss.” United States Supreme Court (photo: Rena Schild / Shutterstock) WASHINGTON — Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito on Monday said that the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling is already posing problems for religious freedom. “By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right [to same-sex marriage] over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem that only it can fix,” the justices wrote in an opinion published Monday. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ‘ruinous consequences for religious liberty,’” they warned. In their opinion, which accompanied the Court’s denial of a writ of certiorari in the case Davis v. Ermold , Thomas and Alito said that the 2015 landmark decision pitted same-sex marrriage against religious liberty. In the case of former county clerk Kim Davis of Kentucky, who in 2015 made headlines for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Thomas and Alito joined the court in denying her petition for a writ of […]
