U.S. Republican Presidential former President Donald Trump speaks to attendees in a rally at the Bojangles Coliseum on July 24, 2024 in Charlotte, North Carolina
With President-elect Donald Trump just weeks away from taking office again, same-sex couples are rushing to get married and start families before Inauguration Day.
Legal experts say fears that marriage equality may be overturned under the second Trump Administration are likely overblown, but the fear is causing couples to upend plans and take actions they wouldn’t have chosen to otherwise.
Related:
“This is not what equality looks like,” 32-year-old Ben Nelson told NBC News recently.
Stay connected to your community
Connect with the issues and events that impact your community at home and beyond by subscribing to our newsletter.
Nelson and his fiancé Adam Weinberger have scrapped their plan to marry next October and will now elope this month.
“We kind of decided that we would take a step back and do what we think is necessary for our lives, not necessarily what our first choice was,” said Weinberger, 31.
While the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges currently protects the rights of same-sex couples to legally marry across the country by declaring state laws banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional, many of those state laws remain on the books. The court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision ensuring the right to an abortion, stoked fears that the same could happen to Obergefell under the court’s current 6–3 conservative majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have signaled they are eager to do just that.
But Mary Bonauto, civil rights project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), insists that marriage equality is not in immediate danger. “I understand that there are things about these times that introduce a lot of uncertainty in people’s lives. I understand that,” Bonauto, who represented plaintiffs in Obergefell, told NBC News. “But right now, and certainly for the foreseeable future, marriage equality is not one of the things that would change.”
As NBC News noted, Trump has not indicated he intends to overturn marriage equality and the Republican party has removed decades-old language defining marriage as being between “one man and one woman” from its platform.
Trump’s spokesperson and incoming press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the outlet that LGBTQ+ people worried about the future of marriage equality “are sadly mistaken and have fallen for the fear mongering from the media.” Leavitt added that overturning marriage equality “was never a campaign promise” Trump made.
“I don’t think that the Supreme Court is going to outright overturn marriage equality with a 6–3 conservative majority,” Slate legal analyst and Supreme Court Correspondent Mark Joseph Stern said on the outlet’s Outward podcast recently. “But I do think that if, say, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dies under Trump and he replaces her, that there’s a very good chance that the Supreme Court could overturn marriage equality.”
Sotomayor, who is 70, has reportedly resisted pressure to retire while President Joe Biden is still in office and can replace her. At the same time, court watchers expect Thomas, 76, and Alito, 74, to retire at some point during the second Trump term.
Even if the Court were to overturn Obergefell, the Respect for Marriage Act – signed by President Biden in 2022 – would still require the federal government and all U.S. states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where same-sex marriage is legal.
But Stern noted that the law is unclear about what would happen if a couple married under Obergefell in a state with a same-sex marriage ban still on the books and then moved to another state with a similar ban on the books after the 2015 decision was overturned. The Respect for Marriage Act, he said, is ambiguous enough that a conservative court could interpret it very narrowly.
“I think it is imperative that gay couples who choose to get married do so in a blue jurisdiction, in a blue state or D.C., that has expressly authorized marriage equality, not through the federal courts, but through the democratic process or through the state courts,” Stern said. “Because if the federal judiciary pulls the rug out from marriage equality, it’s not clear that the new federal law will provide a backstop.”
But even LGBTQ+ couples in blue states are considering fast-tracking their marriage plans. Nelson and Weinberger live in New Jersey, and New York City resident Michael Kaye told NBC News that he and his fiancé had intended to marry in June but are now “strongly considering” tying the knot before Inauguration Day.
“It just feels like we took a step backwards and that fear is resurfacing,” Kaye said. “And it might be a different fear than I felt like when I was in middle school or in high school, but I just feel like there is this fear again around the queer experience.”
Other couples, like 35-year-old Matt Woodruff and his boyfriend, are moving to start the process of becoming parents before Trump takes office in January. While Trump claimed that Republicans “really are the party for IVF” on the campaign trail, the overturning of Roe opened the door to attacks on the fertility treatment, which is often utilized by LGBTQ+ people to have children. In September, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have created a right to access IVF and required insurance companies to cover it.
Trump has claimed he supports universal access to IVF and that, as president, he would order the government or insurance companies to cover the cost of the treatment for all Americans. Nonetheless, Woodruff told NBC News that he fears the in-coming administration could ban same-sex couples from accessing IVF or from adopting.
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
