Obergefell

When the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Obergefell vs. Hodges case 10 years ago that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, the sense of triumph was palpable. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and courthouses were flooded with newlyweds.

But that wasn’t the only response.

Opponents of LGBTQ+ rights immediately began implementing new strategies to limit the decision’s reach and reverse the broader momentum toward LGBTQ+ acceptance, including by casting a small, less understood subset of the queer community — transgender people — as a growing threat to American families and values.

“Right after Obergefell, every effort to advance any equality measure was met with an anti-trans backlash,” said Chase Strangio, a transgender attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and one of the nation’s leading voices on LGBTQ+ legal rights.

In statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, the number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have increased year after year, with 800 being introduced this year alone. The Trump administration also has embraced the shift, with federal agencies aggressively investigating California and threatening its funding over its trans-inclusive policies. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that states may ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The White House is lighted in rainbow colors in 2015 after the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

The strategy has delighted many conservatives. But it has also frightened a community that had seen itself as being on a path toward progress, reviving discussions about the legacy of the Obergefell decision and igniting a fierce debate within the community about the wisdom of its political strategy over the past decade.

Some have questioned whether the efforts since Obergefell to broaden transgender rights were pursued too fast, too soon, playing into the hands of the movement’s political foes. Others say those concerns sound strikingly similar to ones raised during the fight for marriage equality, when some argued that same-sex couples should settle for civil unions to avoid alienating religious moderates.

The conversation is not a comfortable one. Nerves are raw and fear is palpable. Some worry that pointing the finger will further embolden those working to dismantle LGBTQ+ rights. But others argue that a strategic reassessment is necessary after years of setbacks.

“This can be an inflection point for how we move forward — whether we galvanize resources in [an] aligned effort to push back, [or] continue to let ourselves be divided by campaigns and movements and strategies that seek to divide us,” Strangio said. “That’s the real question for this moment.”

The shifting debate

Strangio, now co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, had worked on the Obergefell case and was outside the Supreme Court the day the decision came down. He thought about his younger self, and how impossible such a ruling would have seemed just years before — when state marriage bans were sweeping the country.

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on the victory, he said, as it became clear “within minutes” that anti-LGBTQ+ forces were already regrouping and preparing for the next fight.

One of their first targets was transgender people’s use of public bathrooms. Within months of the Obergefell decision, voters in Houston rejected an anti-discrimination measure after opponents falsely claimed that the ordinance’s gender-identity protections would allow sexual predators to enter women’s bathrooms.

In 2016, North Carolina passed the nation’s first law barring transgender people from using bathrooms aligned with their identities. The measure sparked huge backlash and statewide boycotts, led in part by corporate America — and the bill was rolled back in 2017.

People gather in North Carolina in 2016 to protest the state’s restrictive bathroom bill.

(Emery P. Dalesio / Associated Press)

LGBTQ+ activists were jubilant, viewing North Carolina’s embarrassment as a clear sign that history was on their side and that expanded transgender rights and protections were inevitable. And there would be big wins to come — including the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ+ employees from workplace discrimination nationwide.

However, the tide was already beginning to shift, including as right-wing groups began to identify specific transgender issues that resonated with voters more than bathrooms, and as Trump — in his first term — began taking aim at transgender rights.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, said his organization “poll tested all of these issues, the bathrooms, the showers, the locker rooms,” and found that many were “incredibly unpopular to voters” — but some more than others.

One of the issues that resonated the most, Schilling said, was kids’ healthcare and competition in girls sports. So his group ran with that, including in the 2019 race for governor in Kentucky, when it ran an ad suggesting the Democratic candidate and ultimate victor — Andy Beshear — supported boys competing in girls’ wrestling competitions, when in fact Beshear supported policies barring discrimination based on kids’ gender identity.

Schilling said it was “the left’s insistence that we need to start trans’ing kids” that made the issue a political one. But his group’s strategy in Kentucky helped wake conservatives up to the political value of highlighting it.

“We’re really just tapping into a real vulnerability that Democrats started for themselves,” Schilling said.

Trump had pursued various anti-transgender policies during his first term, including a ban on transgender service members. But during his campaign for reelection, he centered transgender issues like never before, dumping millions of dollars into anti-transgender ads that cast his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as an extreme progressive on such issues.

“Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you,” one ad said.

Once in office, Trump moved even more aggressively against transgender rights than the community had feared — prompting various lawsuits from LGBTQ+ organizations that are still pending.

He issued an executive order declaring there are only two genders, and suggesting transgender people don’t actually exist. He again banned transgender people from serving in the military. He threatened the funding of states such as California with trans-inclusive school policies. He ordered transgender athletes out of youth sports. He said federal law enforcement would target those who provide gender-affirming care to minors. And his administration said it would stop providing transgender people with passports reflecting their identities.

President Trump signs an executive order in February banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports.

(Jabin Botsford / Washington Post via Getty Images)

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the American people “voted for a return to common sense,” and Trump was “delivering on every campaign promise.”

“President Trump’s historic reelection and the overall MAGA movement is a big tent welcome for all and home to a large swath of the American people,” Fields said.

From offense to defense

Reggie Greer, who served as a senior advisor on LGBTQI+ Persons at the State Department in the Biden administration, remembers being in North Carolina during the 2016 bathroom bill fight. While local Democrats were pleased with how it had backfired on Republicans, it was clear to him that “hate is lucrative,” Greer said — with the anti-rights groups raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

He now sees the episode as an early warning of what was to come.

Nick Hutchins handled public affairs around the Obergefell case before joining the Human Rights Campaign, where he worked on state affairs and communications. Traveling through conservative states, he watched as more Republicans began seizing on LGBTQ+ issues after Trump’s 2016 victory.

“It was a moment when Republicans saw an opening and wanted to chip away at LGBTQ rights in any way they could,” Hutchins said. “That’s where you began to see a spaghetti-against-the-wall approach from their end, pursuing the bathroom bills that evolved into various education-focused bills, and healthcare.”

Inside the HRC during Trump’s first term, leadership felt confident that public opinion remained on their side. LGBTQ+ rights organizations had secured victories in statehouses on bathroom and healthcare issues, and were buoyed by Trump’s electoral defeat in 2020.

Yet, several warning signs emerged. Internal state polling by the HRC found large majorities of Americans supported trans rights, but a plurality opposed allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports.

One former HRC staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the organization had not paid much attention to the issue until a series of political attacks in conservative states. The governor’s race in Kentucky was one, followed by a statehouse push in Louisiana.

Still, other battles — including “confronting whiteness in the movement” — took precedent, the former staffer recalled.

“There were significant generational divides within the organization between the older teams and their younger staff that were more diverse on these issues,” the staffer said. “It was a distraction.”

Hutchins said LGBTQ+ organizations today are having “autopsy conversations” to take stock of how things have played out in recent years and identify lessons to be learned.

Leaders look ahead

Among the most prominent leaders of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, there is consensus on many things.

It’s a scary time for LGBTQ+ people and other vulnerable groups, including immigrants and women. Trump represents an existential threat to American democracy. The LGBTQ+ rights movement needs more resources to continue fighting back. Nobody is going to throw transgender people under the bus just because some Democrats have suggested it would help them rebound politically.

“No one person, no one community, is expendable. End of story,” said Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the marriage case.

The actor Laverne Cox, one of the most recognizable transgender women in the country, said the marriage victory in 2015 left the right in need of “a new boogeyman,” and they picked transgender people — a tiny portion of the U.S. population, at around 1%.

They further picked on transgender people in sports — an even tinier group — in order to focus the conversation on “hormones and physical ability,” which is “a great way to objectify trans people, to reduce us to our bodies, and thus dehumanize us,” Cox said.

The best way to fight back, she said, is to refocus the conversation on transgender people’s humanity by allowing them to tell their own stories — rather than allowing their narratives to be “hijacked by propaganda.”

The actor Laverne Cox, shown in April, said trans people should be able to tell their own stories.

(Andy Kropa / Invision / Associated Press)

“We’re just like everybody else in terms of what we want, need, desire, our hopes and fears,” she said. “Living authentically and being able to be oneself is where the focus should be.”

Evan Wolfson, an attorney and founder of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, which is widely credited with securing the 2015 victory in the Obergefell case, said there are “three significant factors” that got the country to where it is today on transgender issues.

The “most important factor by far,” he said, “is the right-wing attack machine and the political agenda of some who are trying to attack and scapegoat and divide” the country around transgender issues.

A second factor, he said, is that transgender identities are still a “relatively new” concept for many Americans, and “that conversation is just not as far along as the very long conversation about who gay people are.”

A third and far less significant factor, he said, are the “missteps” by LGBTQ+ advocates in the last decade, including some vocally renouncing anyone who is not 100% supportive of trans rights.

“We worked hard in the Freedom to Marry campaign to bring people along and to distinguish between those who were our true opponents, those who were really anti-gay, anti-rights, anti-inclusion on the one hand, and those who I called the ‘reachable but not yet reached’ — people who weren’t with us, but weren’t our true opponents, people who were still wrestling with the question,” Wolfson said.

Allowing people a bit more time and space to be brought along on transgender issues will be necessary moving forward, he said — though he stressed that does not mean that advocates should slow down or pull back.

Wolfson rejected the idea that the LGBTQ+ community is moving too fast on transgender rights, which was also argued about marriage, and the idea that transgender rights should be abandoned as a political liability. “There is no reason to believe that we would profit from selling out our principles and doing the wrong thing just to avoid this tough moment,” Wolfson said.

Strangio said the fight for LGBTQ+ rights today cannot be viewed in a vacuum, and that zooming out, “there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about basic constitutional principles and civil rights protections” for all sorts of vulnerable people under the Trump administration.

Still, he said, he believes in the queer community’s “ability to move through setbacks” and come out on ahead of the “billion-dollar global campaigns to undermine equality protections” that began after the Obergefell decision.

“Fighting back was the right course,” he said, “and continuing to assess how we can effectively build support for the entire community is going to be a critical part of this next decade.”

PUT-IN-BAY, Ohio — Nearly 10 years after he changed the lives of every queer person in America, Jim Obergefell sat in a crowded bar on a small island in Lake Erie, watching the close-knit local community celebrate its third annual Pride.

Jim, 58, made history as the lead plaintiff in the landmark legal case Obergefell vs. Hodges, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 26, 2015, that same-sex couples nationwide have a constitutional right to marry.

The last decade has diminished the familiarity of his face, once everywhere on cable news, and he appeared to sit anonymously now, sipping a beer in a booth. But Jim’s legacy still resonates deeply with LGBTQ+ people all over the country, in both red and blue states and in little purplish outposts like Put-in-Bay, too — as Molly Kearney, the queer comedian on stage, would soon make clear.

Kearney spent years working at island bars and restaurants before making it big and landing a gig as the first nonbinary cast member of “Saturday Night Live.” They are something of a legend on the island about three miles off the Ohio coast, and the crowd was loving their set — which was chock full of stories about getting drunk at local watering holes and navigating life and family as a young queer person.

Then Kearney brought up Jim’s case.

The day the Supreme Court issued its decision, Kearney was working at a restaurant called The Forge alongside co-owner Marc Wright, who is gay and one of the organizers of Put-in-Bay Pride. Wright immediately told the LGBTQ+ staff their work day was done.

“I just remember that day so vividly,” Kearney said. “He’s like, ‘All right, all the straight people have to work. All the gay people, leave work — we’re going out on the town!’”

A large Pride flag is held by supporters in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on April 28, 2015. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 26, 2015, that same-sex couples nationwide have a constitutional right to marry.

(Allison Shelley / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The crowd erupted in laughter and cheers, and in apparent approval for Wright, the emcee who had just introduced Kearney.

“It was awesome,” Kearney said, recalling how the whole town seemed to come together to celebrate. “It was a magnificent day.”

Jim, caught off guard, was also clearly tickled as he quietly took in the many smiling faces around him.

A lot of people have told him over the last decade how much his case transformed their lives. Many have cried upon meeting him. Some have said his victory gave them the courage to come out to their families and friends, and even to themselves. One told him she was preparing to take her own life until his win.

Still, Kearney’s story might be his “new favorite,” he said.

For starters, it was darn funny, he said. But it also was rooted in queer acceptance in a small community not unlike the coastal town a short ferry ride away, Sandusky, Ohio, where Jim grew up — and now lives again.

It captured something Jim has observed in his own life the last few years in Ohio, something that might be his greatest legacy, especially in light of recent political efforts to push LGBTQ+ rights backward and queer people back into the closet.

Kearney’s story captured people in an average, not especially progressive American community not just accepting their queer neighbors and friends — but celebrating their right to love.

Signs mark the city limits and some of the notable residents of Sandusky.

Murals and paintings seen in downtown on a Sunday in June.

At home in Sandusky

The night before the comedy show, Jim was in Sandusky, hosting a dinner party in his well-appointed and art-adorned apartment with about a dozen of his closest friends, family and neighbors.

He served some of his own wine — he’s a co-founder of Equality Vines out of Guerneville — and ordered a bunch of pizza, including a Sandusky special: sausage and sauerkraut.

There was his older brother and sister-in-law, Chuck and Janice Obergefell, who recalled traveling to D.C. for the Supreme Court arguments. Their kids are also close to Jim.

“The minute we heard you were going to Washington, we just thought, ‘Wow, this is too cool,’” Janice told Jim. “We’re awfully darn proud of you, but you know that.”

Chuck had worked his whole life in local plants, and had known a few gay men there — regular blue-collar guys who also happened to be the “friendliest people I’ve ever met,” he said. So when Jim came out to him in the early 1990s, it didn’t bother him much, though he did worry about HIV/AIDS.

“I just told him, ‘You’re my brother, I love ya, just be careful,’” Chuck said.

“Then he brought John around,” said Janice, of Jim’s late husband John Arthur.

“And I liked John more than Jim!” Chuck said with a wry smile.

There were several of Jim’s oldest and dearest friends, including Kay Hollek, a friend since they were 4; Judi Nath, a friend since 7th grade; Jennifer Arthur, his 1984 prom date; and Betsy Kay, a friend from high school chorus.

There were also newer friends from town, including Marsha Gray Carrington, a photographer and painter whose work adorns Jim’s walls, and from Jim’s “gayborhood,” as he called it — including neighbors Dick Ries and Jim Ervin, a married couple who briefly employed Jim as a Sandusky segway tour guide, and Debbie Braun, a retired Los Angeles teacher who, like Jim, decided to move back to her hometown.

The conversation ranged freely from Jim’s personal legacy to local politics in Sandusky, which is moderate compared to the red rural towns and bigger blue cities nearby. The talk jumped to national politics and recent attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, which have made some of them worry for Jim’s safety as “an icon of a movement,” as his former prom date put it.

An oil painting hangs on the wall of Jim Obergefell’s parents’ home in June.

Ries and Ervin, who started dating about 17 years ago, drew laughs with a story about learning of the Supreme Court decision. Ervin was bawling — tears of joy — when he called Ries, who was driving and immediately thought something horrible had happened.

“I think the house has burned down, he’s wrecked the car, the dog is dead,” Ries said with a chuckle. It wasn’t until he pulled over that he understood the happy news.

The couple had held off having a marriage ceremony because they wanted it to be “real,” including in the eyes of their home state, Ervin said. After the ruling, they quickly made plans, and married less than 8 months later on Feb. 6, 2016.

“To me, it was profound that once and for all, we could all get married,” Ervin said.

Jim Obergefell, left, and John Arthur, right, are married by officiant Paulette Roberts, rear center, in a plane on the tarmac at Baltimore/Washington International Airport in Glen Burnie, Md., in 2013.

(Glenn Hartong / The Cincinnati Enquirer via Associated Press)

The group talked about what kept them in or brought them to Sandusky: family, the low cost of living, small-town friendliness. They talked about the other queer people in their lives, including some of their children. They mentioned how the only gay bar in town recently closed.

In between the heavier discussions, they chatted in the warm, cheeky patterns of old friends catching up over pizza and wine. At one point, Jim and several of his girlfriends gathered in the kitchen to discuss — what else? — Jim’s dating life.

Just the week before, Jim said, he had realized he was “ready to let go” of John’s ashes, to spread them somewhere special as John had requested, and finally ready to date again.

“I’m open,” he said, as his girlfriends’ eyes lit up.

The case that landed Jim before the Supreme Court started during one of the hardest periods of his life, when John was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The couple had been together for decades, and in July 2013, three months before John’s death, exchanged vows in Maryland, one of the states that recognized same-sex marriages at the time.

However, Ohio refused to acknowledge that marriage, meaning that, when John died, Jim would not be listed as the surviving spouse on his state death certificate. So they sued.

For years after John’s death and the subsequent court rulings in their favor, Jim kept busy co-writing a book, traveling the country giving speeches and attending Pride events and LGBTQ+ fundraisers as a guest of honor. He was mourning John, too, of course, but amid so many other draws on his focus and attention, he said.

“It’s almost like you didn’t get to do it right away,” said Betsy. “You had it delayed.”

After living in Cincinnati from 1984 to 2016 — most of that time with John — Jim moved to D.C. for a few years, but “missed Ohio,” he said.

In 2021, as the COVID pandemic raged, he found himself increasingly lonely, he said, so he decided to move back to Sandusky to be closer to family and friends. Since then, he has been happier, rekindling old connections, making some new ones and even running — unsuccessfully — for office.

Betsy, a mother of nine — some queer — and a ball of energy, said it’s wonderful to have Jim back in town. The one catch, she acknowledged, is the gay dating pool in Sandusky, population about 24,000, is not exactly deep.

To make matters worse, Jim is hopelessly oblivious when it comes to flirting, she said. The other women in the kitchen nodded.

Taking the cue, Jim went to his bedroom and returned with a small pin Betsy had given him, which read, “If you’re flirting with me, please let me know. And be extremely specific. Seriously, I’m clueless.”

Jim looked around his apartment, in his hometown, brimming with fiercely loyal friends and family who not only love him, but want him to find love.

Thanks in part to him, it was a scene that lucky, happy queer people might find familiar nationwide.

A “Greetings from Sandusky, Ohio” sign.

The Ceiling Art Company and a row of buildings on West Market Street downtown.

Jim Obergefell holds a button with a message that reads in part, “if you’re flirting with me please let me know.”.

Back on the island

Shortly after Kearney’s set at Put-in-Bay Pride, Kristin Vogel-Campbell, a 45-year-old bisexual educator from nearby Port Clinton, approached Jim at his booth.

Her friend had just pointed Jim out — told her who he was — and she just had to thank him.

“You’ve done so much for our community,” she said. “You put yourself out there, and did the work that was needed to get the job done.”

Jim, not anonymous after all, smiled and thanked her.

A few moments later, Kearney came through the crowd, high-fiving and hugging old friends. When they, too, were told who Jim was, their jaw dropped.

“Are you serious? … Hold on.”

Marc Wright, left, and Molly Kearney snap a picture together at Put-in-Bay Pride on June 9.

(Courtesy of Marc Wright)

Kearney ran over and grabbed Wright out of another conversation and explained who Jim was. Wright’s eyes went wide — then he reached out and touched Jim on the chest, as if to verify he was real.

Kearney, sticking their arms out to show goosebumps, said, “I have the chillies.”

Kearney doesn’t often include the story of the Supreme Court ruling in their sets, they said, but thought the local crowd would get a kick out of it, because they knew that day had meant a lot to so many people.

“That day — thanks to you — was a very big day for me,” Kearney told Jim. “I didn’t feel fully comfortable — I still don’t — so that day was really important, because everyone was, like, cheering!”

Wright nodded along.

He first came to Put-in-Bay from Cleveland when he was 21 — or a “baby gay,” as he put it. And initially, it was intimidating. “It’s easy to feel like an outcast in a small community, because you’re living in a fish bowl,” he said.

Soon enough, however, the town made him one of their own. People on the island “knew I was gay before I knew, and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, it’s OK,’” Wright said.

He said such acceptance, which has only grown on the island since, is thanks to pioneers like Jim — and like Kearney, whose own success has increased understanding of nonbinary people.

“Just to have Molly go out and live their life so unapologetically, it’s so validating,” Wright said.

Introducing Kearney that afternoon, Wright had thanked the crowd — many of them locals — for proving that Put-in-Bay stands for love and equality, especially at such a difficult time for the LGBTQ+ community.

“Put-in-Bay is for everyone — one island, one family,” he said.

Now, as Jim praised the event, saying it was just the sort of thing that’s needed in small towns all across the country, Wright beamed.