The Supreme Court, that gilded temple of judicial overreach and reactionary zeal, is sharpening its knives a decade after Obergefell v. Hodges forced the bigots of America to grudgingly acknowledge that love is love.
The same justices who gleefully torched Roe v. Wade are now eyeing marriage equality like vultures circling a wounded animal.
At the center of this looming constitutional atrocity stands Kim Davis, the sanctimonious Kentucky clerk who became a right-wing martyr for refusing to do her damn job, now begging the Supreme Court to finish what Clarence Thomas has been frothing to start: the full-scale demolition of LGBTQ+ rights in America.
Lisa McCormick, the firebrand New Jersey progressive who has spent years screaming into the void about the Democratic Party’s spinelessness, insists that this isn’t just the work of frothing theocrats and Federalist Society ghouls.
“The real scandal here is the grotesque failure of so-called progressive Democrats like Senator Cory Booker, who had every chance to codify these rights into law but instead spent their time courting Wall Street donors, posing for viral tweets, and delivering marathon Senate speeches that accomplished precisely nothing,” said McCormick.
“While Booker was busy playing celebrity senator—shoveling snow for the cameras, giving TED Talks on ‘unity,’ and collecting checks from Big Pharma—the GOP was methodically stacking the courts with judges who’d sooner reinstate the Salem witch trials than uphold basic civil rights,” said McCormick. “Now, after a decade of neoliberal complacency, we’re staring down the barrel of a Court that’s one bad day away from erasing LGBTQ marriages from the lawbooks.”
The numbers don’t lie.
“Since Booker waltzed into the Senate in 2013, women lost abortion rights, the Voting Rights Act was gutted, mass shootings tripled, and the middle class evaporated while billionaires hoarded $29 trillion in stolen wages,” said McCormick. “And what did Booker do? He missed 413 votes (9.7% of his job), cosponsored a few nice-sounding bills that went nowhere, and perfected the art of performative outrage without ever actually fighting for the structural changes that could’ve stopped this nightmare.”
Now, Davis’s case—backed by Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver, a man who once compared gay rights activists to Nazis and called marriage equality “the abolition of God”—is the first direct challenge to Obergefell to reach the Court. Staver’s argument is a masterpiece of right-wing gaslighting: He claims Davis, a government employee, has a First Amendment right to impose her medieval theology on taxpayers, and that Obergefell itself was “legal fiction.” Never mind that 70% of Americans support marriage equality—this Court doesn’t give a damn about public opinion. They care about power. And with Thomas, Alito, and the rest of the Federalist Society fanatics salivating at the chance to “correct” Kennedy’s “mistake,” the odds are terrifyingly real.
McCormick’s rage isn’t just directed at the usual Republican villains, though. “The Democratic establishment enabled this,” she snaps. “They had supermajorities. They had moments when public opinion was on their side. They could’ve passed the Equality Act, enshrined Roe, restored the Voting Rights Act, and made Obergefell untouchable. Instead, they fundraised off the threat of fascism while doing nothing to stop it.”
She’s right. Booker, for all his lofty rhetoric about justice, voted against Bernie Sanders’ 2017 drug importation bill—siding with Big Pharma over dying Americans—and spent years cozying up to Wall Street donors who’d happily see LGBTQ rights vanish if it meant another tax cut. Meanwhile, the Respect for Marriage Act, the Democrats’ flimsy attempt to protect same-sex unions after the fact, is riddled with loopholes and religious exemptions that Staver and his ilk will exploit the second they get the chance.
The Southern Baptist Convention is already mobilizing, declaring Obergefell’s reversal a “top priority.” Nine states are drafting laws to nullify marriage equality the second the Court gives the green light. And with Trump’s justices now holding a 6-3 majority, the only question is how fast they’ll move.
McCormick’s warning is a Molotov cocktail hurled at the Democratic establishment’s complacency: “They think they can keep playing nice, keep taking corporate money, keep pretending bipartisanship is possible with people who want queer folks back in the closet and women in handmaid’s robes. Well, wake up. The fight isn’t coming—it’s here. And if Booker and his ilk don’t start acting like it, they’ll be remembered as the gravediggers of democracy.”
The clock is ticking. The Court convenes this fall. And if history is any guide, the Democrats will be too busy giving speeches to stop the slaughter.