Jim Obergefell: ‘It breaks my heart’ that marriage equality could be overturned

More than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex couples’ ability to marry nationwide, Jim Obergefell still sounds slightly startled when he hears his own name — especially now that conservatives are openly discussing overturning the ruling that bears it.

“It’s surreal,” he says, laughing softly from his hotel room before coffee. “There are times I still have to remind myself when I hear or see Obergefell in the news. That’s not just a case. That actually means me.”

In the eleventh year since the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that transformed American civil rights law, the country the famous plaintiff helped reshape feels profoundly different from the euphoric 2015 summer morning when rainbow lights washed over the White House and couples flooded county clerks’ offices nationwide. Back then, marriage equality felt like a culmination. Now, it feels contingent.

The man whose grief became one of the most consequential constitutional cases in modern American history spends much of his time thinking about whether the country could lose it all again.

“We should not feel safe in any of the rights we enjoy,” he says.

In the American civic imagination, Obergefell occupies a strange and intimate place. Brown belongs in textbooks. Roe became doctrine. But Obergefell remains deeply personal. It begins in hospice care, with a dying man named John Arthur and a husband fighting to ensure his name appeared correctly on a death certificate.

That emotional clarity helped accelerate one of the fastest shifts in public opinion in modern political history. When Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, support for marriage equality nationally sat below 30 percent, according to Gallup. Today it hovers near 70 percent. Among Democrats, support exceeds 85 percent. Majorities of younger Republicans support it too.

Plaintiff Jim Obergefell holds a photo of his late husband John Arthur after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015 in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong/Getty Images

More than 823,000 married same-sex couples now live in the United States, according to 2025 estimates from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Nearly 300,000 children under 18 are being raised by married same-sex couples. Marriage equality reshaped inheritance rights, immigration protections, parental recognition, taxation, health care access, and the legal architecture of queer family life in America.

And yet the triumph now carries the unmistakable tension of the era following Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Since then, anxiety around marriage equality has hardened. In his Dobbs concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court should reconsider precedents protecting gay intimacy and marriage rights. Conservative legal activists have openly discussed ways to overturn Obergefell. State lawmakers in Republican-led legislatures have introduced symbolic resolutions condemning the ruling. Organizations that spent decades opposing same-sex marriage have reorganized around newer messaging centered on “parental rights,” “religious liberty,” and “protecting children.”

The face of that effort lives in Seattle.

Katy Faust, founder of the conservative nonprofit Them Before Us, is a leading architect of the “Greater Than Campaign,” a national coalition of 47 conservative organizations pushing the Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell. Her strategy is to reframe the fight away from the rights of adults and toward children she claims are “the real victims” of marriage equality. Among the campaign’s backers are some of the same organizations that spent decades working to overturn Roe.

Obergefell hears all of it.

“Anger,” he says, when asked what goes through his mind listening to conservatives discuss overturning the ruling again. “This feeling of why can’t they worry about things that actually make life better for people instead of trying to harm people?”

The same conservative movement targeting transgender rights has increasingly revived anti-marriage-equality rhetoric, typically framed around children and family structure. Obergefell rejects the argument without hesitation.

“Queer people are eight times more likely to foster and adopt children from the child welfare system,” he says — especially children with special needs who need parents and love. He points to decades of research showing children raised by same-sex couples fare as well as children raised by heterosexual parents, sometimes better.

“This whole children need a mother and a father, and it can only be that and only that? Bullshit,” he says.

He finds one slender source of judicial comfort: Justice Amy Coney Barrett has signaled awareness of how much Americans have built around the right to marry and the disruption overturning it would cause.

“The fact that Amy Coney Barrett is a voice of reason gives me a little bit of hope,” he says.

Obergefell speaks at Family Equality’s Night at the Pier event in New York City.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Family Equality

For him, the current moment feels more frightening than the years leading up to the Supreme Court victory. Back then, LGBTQ+ Americans were fighting for something they had never possessed. Now they are confronting the possibility of being stripped of rights already woven into their lives and families.

“We’ve had 11 years of enjoying that right, of knowing our relationships, our marriages, our families are on a much more equal footing,” he says. “And we stand to lose that.”

That fear no longer sounds paranoid inside queer America. Not after Dobbs. Not after a Supreme Court that once appeared constrained by precedent demonstrated its willingness to dismantle half a century of constitutional protection.

“For almost 50 years, people didn’t think abortion rights would be lost, because the Supreme Court believed in precedent,” Obergefell says. “Well, they no longer do.”

Over the last 11 years, Obergefell has evolved from a reluctant plaintiff into something closer to a national witness. He has officiated more than 30 weddings. He appears at schools and Pride events across the country. Strangers approach him constantly. Couples hand him photographs. Parents tell him about their children. Young queer people confide in him.

“I have kids, young people who have come out to me for the first time ever,” he says.

One teenager recently stopped him after an event at a high school in the Cleveland area.

“Jim,” the student said, “I was three when that decision came out. I’ve only grown up in a world where I know in my future I can marry the person I love.”

That, more than any polling figure or constitutional doctrine, appears to haunt him most now. An entire generation has experienced marriage equality not as a revolutionary change but as an ordinary reality.

“It breaks my heart,” he says, “that this 16-year-old and so many others stand to lose the right to marry the person they love.”

The irony of Obergefell’s public life is that he never appears entirely comfortable inhabiting it. He repeatedly calls himself an introvert. He jokes about being an “accidental activist” — though he has come to refine even that.

“John and I were quiet activists,” he says. “We lived our lives openly. And there’s such power in that.”

But grief transformed him.

Arthur died in 2013, before the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. “John could have just died,” he says quietly. “But John died, and an awful lot of good came out of his impending death.”

He imagines what John would make of it all — of the public life, the strangers, the weddings, the advocacy.

“John could walk into a room and walk out knowing every single person in that room,” he says. “If that were a party, I’d be hiding in the corner thinking, ‘Can we please just go home?’”

He smiles. “I think he would be stunned to see how I’ve changed. And I think he would be proud.”

“The personal one-on-one interactions,” he says, “those are so much more meaningful and important to me than any of the fancy things I’ve done, the famous people I’ve met.”

He returns, above all, to the simple human mechanics of how the country changed.

“When marriage equality happened,” he says, “suddenly across the country, people started to see someone they knew — a family member, a neighbor, a coworker — marry someone of the same sex.”

The country did not change because Americans suddenly embraced constitutional law. It changed because millions of people realized someone they already loved was gay.

“You’re invited to a wedding,” Obergefell says. “It’s someone you care about.”

That may be Obergefell’s real legacy. Not simply a Supreme Court victory, but a transformation so intimate and so ordinary that millions of Americans can no longer imagine their families without it.

“My name’s on this case for one really important reason,” he says. “I loved my husband, and we deserve to exist, and that’s worth fighting for.”

This article is part of The Advocate's July-Aug 2026 print issue, on newsstands July 7. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue now through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.