Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Supreme Court Makes Important Ruling, Case Law Settled?!?

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In breaking news, there are not 4 votes on the US Supreme Court to overturn the Constitutional right for people to marry who they choose and same sex marriage, as the Supreme Court refuses to hear on appeal the case of Kim Davis, the clerk who wouldn’t issue marriage licenses to same sex couples on religious grounds. Michael Popok explains how Davis, the stalking horse of the MAGA right-wing religious zealots who sought to have the Court follow Justice Thomas’ call to have same sex marriage as a constitutional right protected from State attack, overturned, and how even MAGA justices like Amy Coney Barrett and Alito think that’s going too far. Lola Blankets: Get 40% off your entire order at https://lolablankets.com by using code LEGALAF at checkout. Experience the world’s #1 blanket with Lola Blankets. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions and exclusions apply. We got some good news coming out of the United States Supreme Court. They have rejected the attempt to overturn same-sex marriage being led by the MAGA right-wing conservatives with their stalking horse of Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses on religious grounds 10 years ago. She wanted out from under her $300,000 fine. She wanted out from under a judgment against her in that case that she's a bigot, which she was, and they were trying to topple a 10-year constitutional right that's been established in a case called Obergefell back 10 years ago. But in order to do that, you've got to have at least four votes on the United States Supreme

Court to take up an appeal and five to rule in your favor. They can't count. to four because there doesn't seem to be four votes. Not only did the court in its order list today rejected without commentary, there was no dissent or statement made by anybody else. Usually if a Supreme Court justice is upset or thinks they have the votes or they can lobby to get one more vote like five votes, you'll see them issue a statement, zero statement. Which is not surprising when I go through even the MAGA right right wing has said they're not going to overturn same marriage, primarily, not because it's based on substantive due process, which is the foundation for this particular right, but because of the reliance interests of almost 850,000 couples

and 300,000 children that are in same-sex marriage relationships. And they're not going to rip out from under them, they're not going to pull the rug out from under them, the constitutional rug now. So here's the headline, at least at this conference, on this order list. they don't have the four votes. And I don't see that changing next week when it will probably be considered maybe one more time

and then finally rejected. I think this is the nail in the coffin for this particular attempt to take away this particular constitutional right despite the fact that Clarence Thomas has been lobbying his fellow brethren for the last 10 years to try to get four votes and five votes

to overturn it and called for it in the Obergefell case. I'm working on now to brief our audience. I'm working on getting Robbie Kaplan, lawyer extraordinaire out of New York. You might know her from the E. Jean Carroll case. She was also very instrumental in laying the foundation for the Obrickafel case in her defense of marriage act case that went before it at the United States Supreme Court. Can't think of anybody better than Robbie to brief our audience on LegalAF on the Midas Dutch Network.

While you're here, hit the free subscribe button, slide over to LegalAF YouTube. and let's do the exact same thing as we continue to grow that pro-democracy channel. How do we get here? Let's roll back the tape. Kim Davis, disgusting in every way what was a Kentucky clerk. She lost her bid to get re-elected in 2018. She refused on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Kentucky. Shout out to same-sex couples in Kentucky at the time.

And now it's not an easy place, I think, to pull that off. And yet, rather than... and go work in a church, which is what she should do. She said even though she's a municipal government employee, she's not going to issue same-sex marriage licenses to people because she doesn't believe in it. I guess if they went in for a dog license, she wouldn't issue that either.

And if they wanted to pay their taxes, she wouldn't accept it because they're same-sex. So that case was always a loser for her, as well as her being a loser. Kim Davis gets loses in her case because it is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. and no, she doesn't get to impose and shove down our throats and her religious beliefs when she's working in a governmental position.

And so she got fined $300,000. Fast forward, believing after the Dobbs decision in 2022, which ripped away a woman's right to choose under the Roe v. Wade that had been established 50 years earlier, MAGA got all excited and thought maybe we can do the same thing to same-sex marriage. They were encouraged, literally, by Clarence Thomas, who in the Obergefell decision, sorry, in the Dobbs decision on taking away abortion rights, reproductive rights from women, right to choose, he actually wrote calling for the reconsideration of the foundation underneath same-sex marriage, which is what we call substantive due process. here's what he said in particular in two years ago in the Dobbs decision he said the court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrines application in other specific context then he listed griswold versus connecticut which is the right to married couples to have contraception from 1965 lawrence versus texas the right to a consensual sexual acts between

in private, Obergefell v. Hodges, he lists as right to same-sex marriage. He says they're not at issue in this case yet. He's been lobbying now for two years. Problem is he doesn't have the votes. I'll tell you why he doesn't have the votes. Because we picked up some things in the last couple of years of reporting. And it mainly comes down to this concept in jurisprudence called reliance interests. And it's what it sounds like.

If the law changes in your favor and you basically, your life on it, literally. Same-sex marriage declared 10 years ago to be constitutional, which means you can go get marriage licenses and marry the person of your choice. You rely on that to your detriment if that is ripped away from you. That's the reliance interest. So Amy Coney-Barrett while she was shilling her biography, autobiography over the summer, said out loud in her book that things like same-sex marriage, things like marriage, the right to have children, reproductive contraception are not things that we're going to take away from people because of the reliance interests, right? Too much has been already invested by people

in these rights to ever rip them away. Now, the way they sleep at night is they say the reproduction or abortion doesn't fall into the category of reliance because people aren't necessarily relying on abortion in order to do their family planning in the future. So if they lose the right, it's not the same type of reliance as if you got married and had children in reliance on a constitutional principle, right? That's how they justify it. I'm not sure that's right. I'm just telling you how they think.

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a.f for 40% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you. So put Amy Cody Barrett over with Katanji, Brown, Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor. Right? So that's four votes against. overturning same-sex marriage. But you only need four to bring it up on appeal and five to overturned. So where you have five votes left, that means they'd have to run the table and get Alito and Roberts and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch altogether. And I don't think they're ever going to do that because even Alito in a speech he gave

at a conference over the summer also said that reliance interests would would mean that things like same-sex marriage would not be taken away to sort of tamper, you know, temper down expectations that he would vote to overturn same-sex marriage. So if they lost Alito and they lost Amy Coney-Barrant, that means they've got to get Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Thomas. And they just, and where were they going to get the fifth vote from? So I don't see Roberts doing it.

at least not this particular one. And so you'd have, you'd only have four left, and where would you get the fifth vote from? So even if you get the four votes to bring it up into an appeal from the Supreme Court because that's how they vote, where are you getting the fifth vote from? And they know it.

That's why I believe there wasn't a statement that was issued along with the denial today. We may see one next week. We'll keep a close eye on it. There's one more conference I'm waiting on and then the final nail will be in the coffin, but I believe it's already there. I think the nails are already hovering above the coffin.

I think next week we're going to get it. We're going to get it. That's good news. I would hate to live in an America where 850,000 couples, 1.6 million people lose the right to marry the person of their choice constitutional right and leave it to the states. So we've been back to the civil war. You know, 23 states would allow same-sex marriage. You know, the 27 states wouldn't. And what about the 300,000 children caught in the middle of people they call their parents?

It's just, I mean, I just don't see how that would ever, how you unscramble that egg. And I'm glad the Supreme Court doesn't seem to be at present for it. Doesn't mean in the future with a different, less disgusting plaintiff than Kim Davis. They couldn't bring this up to the Supreme Court again. So I don't want to say we're out of the woods because how many times did they go after, Roe versus Wade over 50 years, a number of times, you know, 10 or more. until they finally got the numbers in June of 2022, and they overcame and the Dobbs decision came out.

That was the one of you remember that was leaked in March and then finally entered in June. But we already knew where it was going, written by Alito. So if Alito who wrote Dobbs doesn't believe he can take away a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and you know he wants to, let me just leave it at that. Come on, the monarchy Catholic right, right, Maga right wing of Halito, he would love, if he thought he had the numbers, he would pull that out

in a heartbeat, but he doesn't have it. And that's a good thing. So we'll keep a close eye on it. I'll try to get Robbie Kaplan on to talk to you and brief us in an interview on LegalAF. In the meantime, in our fast-moving stories, come to LegalAF YouTube. We're going to crack that one million barrier in about a year. We've been working hard at it. We're at 926,000. I think at the rate we're going, we're going to get there in about six weeks. Check to see if you are subscribe and if you're not in it, people ask, how do you keep legal AF on the air? How do you do 40 videos a week, Popak, along with your contributors? That's how we do it. We have an amazing subscriber base, a fervent audience and support in this fellowship. We're protecting each other's

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