Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks Americans are ready to accept a ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide in an notably direct interview with Bloomberg.
“I think it’s doubtful that it wouldn’t be accepted,” Ginsburg said Wednesday of a nationwide marriage equality ruling, pointing to the shift in public opinion toward gay people.
“The change in people’s attitudes on that issue has been enormous,” the 81-year-old Ginsburg continued. “In recent years, people have said, ‘This is the way I am.’ And others looked around, and we discovered it’s our next-door neighbor — we’re very fond of them. Or it’s our child’s best friend, or even our child. I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
Ginsburg’s remarks appear to reinforce the views of many court observers that the Supreme Court is ready to rule in favor of marriage equality, a view most recently expressed by President Barack Obama.
“My sense is that the Supreme Court is about to make a shift, one that I welcome, which is to recognize that — having hit a critical mass of states that have recognized same-sex marriage — it doesn’t make sense for us to now have this patchwork system and that it’s time to recognize that, under the equal protection clause of the United States, same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else,” Obama said earlier this week during an interview with BuzzFeed News.
“I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
But while Ginsburg believes most Americans would accept a sweeping ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, this week has left little doubt others would be less welcoming. Led by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, judges in more than half of Alabama’s 67 counties have defied a federal court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to extend the stay of a U.S. district court’s ruling overturning the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Moore threatened probate judges who did issue marriage license that they would be “acting in violation of their oaths to uphold the Alabama Constitution if they issued marriage licenses prohibited under Alabama law.”
Moore, who has admitted state courts would be bound by a nationwide marriage equality ruling from the Supreme Court, has been compared to George Wallace, the Alabama governor who defied a federal order to desegregate Alabama schools in the 1960s.
“It’s a shame and a disgrace what is happening in Alabama today, my native state,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, said Tuesday on The Diane Rehm Show. “It’s almost like Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. You cannot have equality and justice for some and not for all under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It’s not right, it’s not fair and it’s not just.”
Lewis said he believes the Supreme Court will do “what is right” and Alabama will “become part of the 21st century.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage in April, with a ruling handed down in June. In a written dissent, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the denial of a stay in the Alabama case “may well be seen as a signal of the Court’s intended resolution of that question” of same-sex marriage.
“There was a familiarity with people that didn’t exist in the beginning when the race problem was on the front burner because we lived in segregated communities and it was truly a ‘we, they’ kind of thing,” Ginsburg said Wednesday. “It’s not so, I think, of the gay rights movement. It would not take a lot of adjustment. And of course we shouldn’t speak much more about this subject because one way or another it will be decided before we leave town in June.”
With Obergefell at risk and 32 states poised to restrict same-sex marriage, LGBTQ advocates push to enshrine protections at the state level.
By Maximilian Sandefer
August 6, 2025
On June 22, 2022, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Abortion rights were now no longer guaranteed nationwide as the issue was left up to the states. This shock reversal of over 49 years of precedent left reproductive rights activists scrambling as anti-choice state laws stemming from as far back as 1864 were revived and reinstituted.
As people's ability to access to reproductive care dwindled in conservative-led states, activists also found their footing. The 2024 election saw abortion rights ballot measures win in seven out of ten states. As we navigate a landscape where it will likely be a long time before we see any form of successful federal legislation protecting a woman's right to choose, state-by-state activism seems to be the driving force behind change.
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 59% of LGBTQ U.S. adults under age 50 who have never been married say they want to marry someday -- nearly the same as the 63% of non-LGBTQ adults who do. About 12% of each group say they never want to marry, while more than one-quarter are unsure of their future marriage plans.
By age, younger Americans who have never been married are more eager to wed than older peers, who are less certain and more doubtful about ever marrying.
Among those aged 18 to 29 who have never married, 67% of LGBTQ adults and 73% of non-LGBTQ adults say they want to marry someday. By contrast, just 48% of LGBTQ adults and 49% of non-LGBTQ adults aged 30 to 49 say the same, with nearly one-third in each group unsure.
In her first televised interview since her 2020 confirmation, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to promote her new book, offering only vague commentary to host Norah O’Donnell in defense of the Court’s legitimacy when asked whether justices might overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.
Barrett was pressed on recent remarks from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who told the Raging Moderates podcast that the Court will likely “do to gay marriage what they did to abortion” and “send it back to the states.”
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