The Ongoing Betrayal of Red States on Overturning Obergefell

In state after state, Republican legislators display both cowardice and short-sightedness when it comes to pushing back against Obergefell.

Arthur Schaper | May 18, 2026

For the last two years, MassResistance has aggressively campaigned to reverse same-sex “marriage” by promoting nonbinding state legislative resolutions in several state legislatures, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. We have consistently maintained that Obergefell is an illegitimate judicial overreach that contradicts the Constitution’s original understanding, natural law, biological reality, and the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Our model resolution frames Obergefell as fundamentally flawed, based on the most unfounded legal reasoning. The majority decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, relied on the judicial fiction of substantive due process, which unleashed a host of terrible Supreme Court precedents. From there, Kennedy argued that there is a right to same-sex marriage, even though marriage is not defined in the Constitution nor rooted in our nation’s history and traditions.

We drew most of our resolution’s legal arguments from the dissenting Justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito), who argued that Obergefell undermined democratic processes, imposed an unjustified moral vision on the country, and ignored federalism.

Most importantly, however, redefining marriage caused great harm to the country, as MassResistance predicted. Same-sex “marriage” has unleashed an accelerated decline in marriage rates overall, challenges to religious liberty (bakers, photographers, adoption agencies), the spread of LGBT ideology in schools and public institutions, and harm to public health and public order. Our resolutions serve as a first step and signal to a post-Dobbs Supreme Court that states retain interest in this domain, much as Dobbs (2022) returned abortion to the states by correcting........

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