On Christmas Eve 2014, Bill Stevens and Robert Brings were among two couples involved in a lawsuit against Orange County after their marriage license request was denied. By Jan. 6, 2015, the two became the first gay couple in the county to obtain a same-sex marriage license, just seven months prior to the historic Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which required all states to license and recognize same-sex marriages.
Ten years later, some are beginning to question whether the Supreme Court will reconsider its ruling under the new Trump administration, especially after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“I don’t think there’s anything off the table, and it’s unfortunate to feel that way,” Stevens says. “It’s just changed everything.”
Within the first week of President Donald Trump’s second term, he signed 37 executive orders targeting diversity programs, migrant status and climate change policies. LGBTQ+ rights took an exceptionally hard hit, with Trump eliminating DEI programs for federal positions intended to prevent marginalized groups from discrimination in addition to ridding the White House of its Gender Policy Council and the Department of Education’s guidelines on how to protect and support LGBTQ+ folks in school systems. He also announced that the United States government will now only recognize the sexes male and female.
Stevens and his husband were together for seven years before they got married, though he states they would’ve gotten married much sooner had they had the chance. Even before they were legally bound, the pair took the necessary steps to ensure they were “covered” in the event of a tragedy, like establishing power of attorney and having a trust for their home. Now, they simply check “husband” on any government document.
“All that stuff just comes with being legally married; you don’t even realize until you don’t have those rights,” Stevens says.
The fight for marriage equality in the United States faced many challenges at the state and national levels and spanned decades. The first lawsuits seeking same-sex recognition date back to the early 1940s when Americans began to question civil marriage rights.
By the 1990s, many civil unions existed from state to state. However, they followed a “separate but equal” standard, and same-sex couples were still denied access to more than 1,100 federal rights associated with the institution. In 1996, then President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of same-sex couples.
Gail Foreman, a former Sarasota PRIDE board member and high school teacher for over 30 years, married her wife the first day same-sex marriage became legal in Florida. Even though she had already been with her wife for 23 years, this was not her first wedding.
Decades before the ruling, Foreman married her best friend at the Sheriff’s Department for protection. Even after getting divorced 10 years later, she still had to “play the game” of having one of her gay male friends escort her to work functions due to the Ohio school’s “good moral conduct clause.” Had anyone found out she was dating a woman, her job would’ve been at risk.
“We marched, we did all of the standard old dog protest stuff, we fought for the rights that we all enjoy now,” Foreman says. “To see it being more widely accepted, and then all of a sudden, there’s a shift in political viewpoints. I equate it to history repeating itself — now I have kids that come into my room every day afraid that because they’re gay, they’re going to get bullied again.”
Foreman was one of the first teachers to have her classroom emptied following Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law, which targeted classroom discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity. All of the flags Foreman’s students had hung up to make the classroom feel like their own had been removed.
Due to the law, district policy now requires permission slips from the guardians of students seeking to become a member of an LQBTQ+-centered club like the Gender-Sexuality Alliance. Therefore, if a queer student is seeking support, advice or resources but doesn’t have accepting parents, Foreman says they’re putting their child in danger.
“Are we going back to where I was 50 years ago when lesbians wore pinky rings on their right or left hands for signals, flipped up collars on their shirts on one side or the other?” Foreman asks. “Are we going to have to go back to that nonsense again to protect ourselves?”
Stratton Pollitzer, Deputy Director and Co-Founder of Equality Florida, doesn’t think so.
Pollitzer has co-led Equality Florida since 1997. During that time, he helped grow the organization into the largest LGBTQ+ state-based advocacy organization in the country. He oversees Equality Florida’s Safe and Healthy Schools project, which, according to the website, has “trained over 40,000 principals, counselors, and teachers from all 67 Florida school districts.”
He recalls the biggest day of his career, the day he changed the most minds and the most hearts: his wedding day, back in 1999, at the end of a little dirt road in South Carolina.
“My family was supportive of me as a gay young man, but there was sort of a limit to their understanding,” Pollitzer says. “When they saw us standing there, saying our vows, that was something they could really recognize and relate to — the desire to dedicate your life to another person, to say that you wanted to care for them in sickness and health, be there for them throughout their life, raise a family together.”
Through all his years of advocacy work within the LGBTQ+ community, he discovered that the key to making people understand the community was not through the rights they were denied, their lack of health insurance or various tax implications, but instead through the love stories of other same-sex couples.
“We kept losing; we lost in 26 states, one after the next, after the next, after the next,” Pollitzer says. “Then, we figured out that we had the secret weapon, the secret tool in our toolbox all along, and that tool is love. We started talking about our love stories, about our families— something we had tried to hide during the fight.”
This catalyst led to the interviewing of more than 1,000 same-sex couples in town halls all over the state to serve as plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Florida for refusing same-sex marriage licenses. Even though Equality Florida only picked two couples to serve in the lawsuit, the fight was won by telling bits and pieces of the hundreds of love stories they heard — one of which was Stevens’.
A decades-long fight had finally reached an end in Florida. In the two days following the ruling, Equality Florida estimated that more than 1,400 same-sex couples got married.
Pollitzer and his husband of 16 years held a “recreation” of their wedding the same day the court ruled in their favor. Nadine Smith, co-founder and CEO of Equality Florida, officiated the wedding.
“That moment when Nadine said, ‘By the power vested in me by the State of Florida,’ you realize how hard and how long you have been fighting for something that part of you thought would never come,” Pollitzer says. “And that is the moment when the full impact of the achievement sinks in.”
Because the overwhelming majority of Americans support marriage equality, Pollitzer believes it’s here to stay. So does Florida Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who married his husband, Watermark Out News contributor Jerick Mediavilla, in 2019.
Guillermo Smith states that same-sex marriages in Florida being overturned is very unlikely, adding that hypothetically, if there were an overturn, Florida would have an extra layer of protection, and existing marriages would not be impacted.
“Florida is in a strong position — The Florida Supreme Court struck down the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in our state constitution even before the Supreme Court of the United States did the same,” Guillermo Smith says. “Same-sex marriage in Florida is already the law of the land.”
Obergefell v. Hodges is protected under the 14th Amendment, which means it cannot be overturned through an executive order or federal law and instead would require a Supreme Court ruling.
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion on the case in 2015 states that “the right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.”
Additionally, former President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law in 2022, repealing the already invalidated Defense of Marriage Act of the mid-‘90s. This act states that all state and federal governments must recognize all marriages regardless of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity or national origin.
Although Supreme Court rulings are rarely overturned, the court has a conservative supermajority of 6-3, three of whom were appointed during Trump’s first term.
When the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas noted he would be interested in revisiting other cases rooted in similar legal footing, such as Obergefell v. Hodges.
Roe, Obergefell and other cases that guarantee the right to contraception and same-sex sexual relations are all built around the Fourteenth Amendment’s right to substantive due process.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe’s overturning, stated that “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” However, Thomas’ concurring opinion suggests differently.
Thomas wrote, “As I have previously explained, ‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that lacks any basis in the Constitution.”
If the Due Process Clause doesn’t secure substantive rights, various rights are at risk — including same-sex marriage.
“Roe recognized the fundamental right to privacy that has served as a basis for so many more rights that we’ve come to take for granted, that are ingrained in the fabric of this country,” Biden stated. “The right to make the best decisions for your health. The right to use birth control. A married couple in the privacy of their bedroom, for God’s sake. The right to marry the person you love.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was a part of the majority opinion in Obergefell, warned that the Supreme Court may target marriage equality after a 6-3 ruling that stated, “U.S. citizens have no constitutional interest in their noncitizen spouses being able to enter the U.S.,” according to The New Republic. In her dissenting opinion, she states that the majority fails to respect the right to marriage.
She gave similar criticism to the conservative supermajority after another Supreme Court case ruled in favor of a website having the right to deny business to same-sex couples.
Her dissenting opinion stated, “This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.”
Last month, the Republican majority Idaho House of Representatives called on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 same-sex marriage ruling, voting to pass a memorial Jan. 27. While a memorial does not carry any legal weight to it, it does show that the current GOP feels empowered to take on marriage equality. So far, the Supreme Court has not shown cause that they would revisit the decision.
Trevor Rosine-Baez, newlywed, president of PFLAG Tampa and current Watermark Out News contributor, fears the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction.
“Thinking from a power stance, what better of a time for Trump to attack marriage rights than the 10-year anniversary?” he says. “If we look at their playbook from the last administration, they very intentionally attacked rights during a time where those rights were being celebrated by that specific community.”
In addition to Trump reclaiming office, many are drawing concerns from Project 2025, which defines itself as a “historic movement, brought together by over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.”
“I would really submit that this is a very small but loud minority of folks that are very well-resourced,” Rosine-Baez says. “They have a lot of money, they’ve got the lawyers, they’ve got the time, they’ve got the bank account — but we’ve got the moral high ground, and looking at history, that always shines through.”
Although Trump has separated himself from the project, many of the executive orders signed within his first week of office heavily align with the project’s policies, which outline plans to escape the country’s grip from the “radical Left,” explicitly targeting LGBTQ+ rights, denying the existence of transgender people and same-sex marriage.
“As long as we’re holding each other together and collectivizing our power, I really feel that we can get through this, and we’ve got to see it through all the way this time; we’ve got to see these protections codified into our Constitution,” Rosine-Baez says. “These are the same people that are working to erode reproductive freedom and voting rights protections for marginalized communities. These are not original ideas. They’re just throwing shit at the wall and trying to make it stick.”
Whether they believe same-sex marriage is at risk or not, all who spoke with Watermark Out News said the same thing: the queer community has fought this fight before and, if it calls for it, they’ll do it again.
“I’m 60 now, so I’ve seen a lot of things happen and change, and there are things like gay marriage that when I was growing up, I thought would never, ever be a possibility,” Stevens says. “I think this is just, unfortunately, a horrible speed bump in time.”
Stevens stresses the importance of fighting battles that aren’t necessarily your battles — “if you’re queer, fight against racism. If you’re a feminist, fight for the queer community. If you’re a U.S. citizen, fight against mass deportation. Change only comes when we fight not only for ourselves but for our friends, families and neighbors.”
Pollitzer shares a similar sentiment, emphasizing the need to highlight the trans community at such a dire time in history — a time when their very existence is being denied.
“[The far-right] are relying on the fact that people don’t know transgender folks,” Pollitzer says. “This has to be the moment that we tell stories about the real impacts of these laws, about the good people out there in the world who aren’t being heard and bring their stories and humanity forward.”
Foreman comes from a family of protestors. She says when she was about 11, her mom dragged her to the protests advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, which later passed Congress in 1972. She was also on the picket lines for the Ohio Bell strike, had family members arrested for advocating for the 19th Amendment and others that were involved in the Freedom Rides.
Her history with protests taught her how to fight for what you believe in, and she wants to ensure that younger folks know how to as well.
“We have to make sure the kids know that they can make change, that they don’t have to sit back and accept whatever is thrown at them, that they are truly, truly the future,” Foreman says. “We have to raise them well, and we have to teach them how to be independent and autonomous and to go out there and fight for what you believe in. That’s our job. That’s our legacy.”
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