Brian Camenker is used to being on the losing side of the same-sex marriage debate.
He fought unsuccessfully for years to reverse his home-state Massachusetts’ decision in 2004 to legalize same-sex marriages, the first state in the union to do so. He grew even more determined after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision in June 2015 established a federal right to marry, a ruling that Mr. Camenker calls “fundamentally flawed.”
Mr. Camenker’s organization, MassResistance, is among a constellation of conservative, mostly evangelical groups that is laying the groundwork for a long-shot legal push to try to get the Supreme Court to roll back Obergefell. They argue that the social and legal pressure to accept same-sex marriages is undermining religious liberty and the traditional family, and that states should reclaim authority to regulate such unions, just as they now do for abortion.
Why We Wrote This
It’s been a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a right to same-sex marriage. Public acceptance has grown since then, but some conservatives aim to challenge that ruling in an echo of what happened with Roe v. Wade.
Simply put, Obergefell, in their eyes, was a mistake. And what the Supreme Court giveth it can take away.
“All you have to do is persuade five of the nine judges,” says Mr. Camenker.
Courtesy of Brian Camenker
Rolling back same-sex marriage rights is not something that the Republican Party at large – or President Donald Trump – particularly wants to take on. Public opinion, party leadership, votes in Congress, and legal scholarship all suggest that opponents of same-sex marriage face a severe uphill battle. Even before the Obergefell ruling, polling showed a majority of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to marry, and a surge in same-sex marriages since then appears to have boosted public approval and reinforced a view in Washington that what was once a powerful wedge issue now has mainstream acceptance.
To many who defend same-sex marriage, opposition by people like Mr. Camenker appears rooted in bigotry. Some watchdog organizations label MassResistance a hate group.
Mr. Camenker and his allies say their movement is based on traditions tethered to biology, society’s reliance on marriage as a support for child-rearing, and “natural law” – plus, for many, proscriptions in the Bible.
“When marriage is redefined, fatherhood and motherhood are deemed optional, and it is children who suffer,” Arthur Schaper, field director for MassResistance, told a North Dakota state legislative committee in February.
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptists passed a resolution at an annual convention held in Dallas to oppose Obergefell and other laws “that defy God’s design for marriage and family.”
Backers of the resolution are aware of the uphill nature of their battle. The nonbinding resolution is an effort “to keep the conversation alive,” its author, Andrew Walker, a Baptist from Kentucky, told The New York Times.
In 2022, Congress voted to codify same-sex marriages in a bill that passed with bipartisan support. The Respect for Marriage Act replaced the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which had defined marriage as between “one man and one woman.” Similar language was officially removed just last year from the Republican Party platform, which had previously castigated Obergefell as robbing Americans “of their legitimate constitutional authority” to define marriage as heterosexual.
But opponents see a new opening, fueled by anti-“woke” politics on the right and a broader rejection among independents and even some Democrats of new left-wing orthodoxy on gender and identity. Beneath the surface of public acceptance of same-sex marriage, they believe, lie a widening partisan divide and a conservative reaction against society’s leftward shift on LGBTQ+ rights and gender roles, which could be mobilized in a campaign against Obergefell. And the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, overturning a national right to abortion that had held for five decades, showed that the most dogged climbers sometimes do eventually reach the summit.
“There is a sense of at least some momentum on the far right for trying to gut those marriage protections,” says Melissa Deckman, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute.
Ms. Deckman says PRRI’s polling shows that while there’s broad support for same-sex marriage, there has been a “collapse” of support among young Republicans in recent years. In 2020, about 64% of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29 supported marriage equality, compared with 83% of Democrats. In 2024, Democrats’ views were almost unchanged, but only 51% of young Republicans approved. Young men were more likely to disapprove than young women.
Similarly, a Harvard Youth Poll that surveyed more than 2,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 in March 2025 found a sharp partisan divide: Fifty-two percent of Republican respondents said same-sex marriage was “morally wrong,” compared with 11% of Democrats. According to Gallup, there is a 47-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on approval of marriage equality, the highest since it began tracking this measure in 1996. Gallup found that Republican support in 2025 had fallen to 41%, down from a 55% peak in 2022 but still above the 30% level in July 2015.
Seeking change at the state level first
Since the 2015 Obergefell ruling, the Supreme Court has moved to the right, a shift that President Trump engineered in his first term when he appointed three conservative justices. Those justices later delivered the reversal of Roe v. Wade that Mr. Trump had promised to Evangelicals and other social conservatives who voted for him in 2016. In a concurrent opinion for the Dobbs ruling, Judge Clarence Thomas wrote that Obergefell could be overturned on similar grounds as Roe since a right to marry is neither in the Constitution nor “deeply rooted” in U.S. history.
Those seeking to overturn Obergefell closely match those who patiently worked for Roe’s demise. The Southern Baptist network of mostly white evangelical churches, which has more than 12 million members and is aligned with the Republican Party, has long served as a base of support for the anti-abortion movement.
Mr. Trump has shown no interest, however, in reversing Obergefell. As a candidate last year, he excoriated transgender rights and diversity programs, but not same-sex marriages, a choice that speaks to a political consensus that extends to some, if not all, of his MAGA base. “Trump is reluctant to fully embrace the culture wars when politically it’s unpopular,” says Ms. Deckman.
Mr. Camenker agrees that Mr. Trump isn’t an ally on this issue, and that the president seems more interested in courting LGBTQ+ donors, as he did in December 2022 at a celebration of gay rights held at Mar-a-Lago. The event was a gala for Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ+ group. “We are fighting for the gay community,” Mr. Trump told the tuxedoed guests.
“President Trump has been terrible on this issue,” Mr. Camenker says.
So this year his organization took another tack: drafting resolutions for GOP state lawmakers who oppose same-sex marriage. Nonbinding resolutions calling for a reversal of Obergefell were introduced by lawmakers in statehouses in Montana, Idaho, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Michigan, though none were passed or signed into law.
Mr. Camenker describes the resolutions as a way to show the Supreme Court how states feel about the issue. “They have some legitimacy,” he says. In public hearings, MassResistance officials told lawmakers that states should reclaim their authority to restore “the natural order of marriage” and claimed that “strong families” had been eroded by the court’s ruling.
Around half of all states have constitutional or statutory bans, or other limits, on same-sex marriages. Should the Supreme Court end a federal right to marry, these laws would take effect, though these states would still be required to recognize same-sex couples who married in other states under the Respect for Marriage Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022.
Josh Schriver, a Republican lawmaker in Michigan, introduced an anti-Obergefell resolution in February that drew swift condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and from officials, including Attorney General Dana Nessel, the first LGBTQ+ person elected to a statewide position in Michigan. “I’m not giving up the fight to maintain [marriage equality], and I’m … not giving up this ring,” Ms. Nessel said in a video posted on the social platform X, showing her ring finger.
In a statement, Mr. Schriver described the 2015 Supreme Court ruling as “a judicial imposition that disrupted the moral framework necessary for a stable and flourishing society.” He said his resolution would restore order and end an “aberration” that wasn’t a “settled norm.”
“If we are serious about preserving the legacy of Western civilization, then restoring foundational institutions like marriage is essential,” he told the Monitor.
A legal showdown
Overturning Obergefell would require a constitutional case to be litigated and appealed before it could reach the Supreme Court; state resolutions that challenge rulings carry no legal weight. “The court only addresses concrete disputes … not theoretical requests,” says Daniel Pinello, a political scientist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
One such case involves Kim Davis, a clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses and was sued in 2015. A petition filed by Liberty Counsel, an evangelical law firm, seeks a review of her case with the explicit goal of overruling Obergefell. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently denied a request to overturn a civil verdict against her.
Any legal showdown could be years away, says Mr. Camenker, though he takes encouragement from Justice Thomas’ Dobbs opinion and hopes that states will eventually regain authority over who is permitted to marry. “People shouldn’t be forced to accept gay marriage,” he says.
He denies that the public has come to accept these unions. What the Supreme Court has done, he says, “is force everyone else to accept this. Every business has to accept this. Every school has to teach that it’s legitimate.”
He adds, “Homosexuality is naturally abhorrent to people, and it always has been.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has described MassResistance as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. Mr. Camenker says his group is a pro-family organization that advocates on many issues, not just same-sex marriage.
Professor Pinello, who has written several books on and advocated for marriage equality, says he used to consider Obergefell the final word and to be settled law. The 2022 Dobbs decision changed his calculus, though, as a federal right seen as inviolable was taken away.
Yet the reactions to the same ruling and to revelations about justices accepting gifts from wealthy donors also put some pressure on the court for restraint. “I still think Obergefell is going to remain in place, if for no other reason than the Dobbs decision had a devastating impact on public opinion of the Supreme Court,” he says.
