Supreme Court weighs longshot appeal to overturn decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide

Updated 2:02 PM EST, November 7, 2025

By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — A call to overturn the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide is on the agenda Friday for the justices’ closed-door conference.

Among the new cases the justices are expected to consider is a longshot appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple whom she denied a marriage license.

The justices could say as early as Monday what they’ll do.

In urging the court to take up her case, Davis’ lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling.

Thomas was one of four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who also remain on the court.

Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned.

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Michael Eric Dyson: "A symbolic Jew has Invited a Metaphoric Hitler to Commit Holocaust and genocide upon his own people”

MSNBC's Dyson on Clarence Thomas: A symbolic Jew has Invited a Metaphoric Hitler to Commit Holocaust

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Published on Jun 26, 2013


Unconscionable racism and defamation of character runs rampant on the left in the wake of the Voting Rights Act decision on Tuesday. Though the decision was cast by a majority of the Supreme Court justices, the wrath of the left has largely been directed at Justice Clarence Thomas, a black justice who has earned the ire of liberals for decades for having the audacity to break the presuppositions of the left that to be black is to be dogmatically liberal.

In a segment on MSNBC's Martin Bashir, Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson rehashed the issues of the Civil War and lobbed outrageous rhetoric at Justice Thomas saying, "A symbolic Jew has invited a metaphoric Hitler to commit holocaust and genocide upon his own people."

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P.S.

Michael Eric Dyson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life

Dyson was born to African-American parents, Everett and Addie Dyson. He attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan on an academic scholarship but left and completed his education at Northwestern High School.[1] He became an ordained Baptist minister at 19 years of age.[2] Having worked in factories in Detroitto support his family, he entered Knoxville College as a freshman at age 21.[3] Dyson received his Bachelor's from Carson–Newman College (magna cum laude) in 1985,[1] and his Master's and Doctorate in religion, from Princeton University. Dyson serves on the board of directors of the Common Ground Foundation, a project dedicated to empowering urban youth in the United States.[4] Dyson and his wife, writer and ordained minister Marcia L. Dyson,[1] are regular guests and speakers at the Aspen Institute Conferences and Ideas Festival.[5][6] Together, they lecture on many American college campuses.

Career

Dyson has taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, Brown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, DePaul University, and theUniversity of Pennsylvania.[1] Since 2007, he has been a Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University.

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Enough said!

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Clarence Thomas’s Friendship With Magnate Puts Focus on Ethics

A multimillion-dollar project to preserve a seafood cannery in Pin Point, Ga., highlights an unusual, and ethically sensitive, friendship between the Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, and Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Since the two men met, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia. In several instances, reports of Mr. Crow’s largess has provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the cannery museum, his largest and previously unreported act of generosity, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct.
Although the Supreme Court is not bound by the code, justices have said they adhere to it. Justice Thomas, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment. Mr. Crow also would not comment.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/politics/19thomas.html?emc=na

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Sotomayor Gets Nearly $1.2M for Memoir

By AP Friday, May 27, 2011


Source: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2074493,00.html#ixzz1NgWyJrL0

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor appears on the second day of her Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on July 14, 2009

Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2074493,00.html#ixzz1NgWedDdv

(WASHINGTON) — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says she received nearly $1.2 million to write a memoir of her rise from a South Bronx housing project to the nation's highest court.

Sotomayor reported the payment for the as-yet untitled book from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group in an annual report of personal finances, released Friday for the justice and her eight colleagues. Knopf revealed last July that Sotomayor had agreed to write the memoir, but the size of the advance had not been public.
(See: Sonia Sotomayor: Bronx (and Baseball) Role Model)

The book will come out simultaneously in English and in Spanish, but no release date has been set. Sotomayor is the court's first Hispanic justice. Her parents moved from Puerto Rico to New York after World War II.

Justice Clarence Thomas also received more than $1 million in advance of the publication of his book, "My Grandfather's Son," in 2007.

Thomas reported that his wife, Virginia, received salary and benefits from two conservative advocacy groups she created, Liberty Central and Liberty Consulting. The amounts were not disclosed; they are not required.

Two justices reported receiving royalties for books they published in recent years. Justice Stephen Breyer traveled the country to promote his new book "Making Our Democracy Work." He received nearly $60,000 in royalties.

Justice Antonin Scalia took in $38,000 for "Making Your Case," the book about legal advocacy that he co-wrote with Bryan Garner.

Breyer also reported selling his shares of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., valued at $15,000 to $50,000. The stock sale allowed Breyer to take part in the court's consideration of Wal-Mart's effort to end a massive sex discrimination lawsuit. The court is expected to decide that case by the end of June.

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'Natural Law, An Elusive Tradition

For a time, the hearing on Clarence Thomas last week promised to provide a mini-course on the elusive concept of "natural law." But it never happened. In his opening statement, Sen. Joseph Biden offered three interpretations of natural-law doctrine, none of which was accurate, and demanded to know which version Thomas subscribed to. In his clearest response, Thomas said only that he regards natural law as a "philosophical background" to the Constitution.

In essence, natural law is a broad philosophical tradition which holds that there are certain principles of right and ,wrong which human beings, through the diligent use of reason, can discover and apply in the creation of a just society. Some natural-law exponents are religious thinkers who ground their philosophy in a divine creator; others are secular philosophers who regard certain moral principles and rights as beyond doubt or compromise. Applied to jurisprudence, natural-law precepts have acted as a cheek on those in power-medieval popes no less than democratic majorities. Historically, campaigns of civil disobedience against unjust but validly enacted laws have been mounted on the supposition that universal moral principles do exist.

Had Thomas been allowed to summon the dead as witnesses for natural law's defense, the Senate would have surely been impressed. Confucius, Aristotle and Cicero believed that human nature is bound by moral laws. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian thinkers, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, elaborated natural-law philosophies. In the 17th and 18th centuries, John Locke, Montesquieu and Thomas Jefferson espoused a related form of natural law in the guise of "natural rights." Both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to natural law and rights in their efforts to overcome slavery and American apartheid. Indeed, the very words of the Declaration of Independence--"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal"-owe their force to the naturallaw tradition.

Why, then, was Thomas put on the defensive? In part, rays Michael McConnell, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, the attack on natural law "is connected to the anti-Catholic reaction to Thomas's nomination."Thomas was schooled in the Roman Catholic tradition which holds that abortion is the unjust taking of an innocent life. But Thomas is now an Episcopalian, and most of his public comments on natural law have more to do with Locke's secular version of natural rights than with the tradition of Aquinas and the popes. As McConnell points out, natural-rights principles have been invoked on either side of the abortion issue within the realm of constitutional law: rights of the unborn versus the right to privacy.

As last week's debate made clear, some critics assume that natural law allows a justice to base decisions on his personal moral convictions. On the contrary, argues Prof Robert George, who teaches the philosophy of law at Princeton University, respect for the rule of law is central to the natural-law tradition as it unfolds from Aristotle and Aquinas down through British-American common law. "This includes regard for precedent, procedure and statutory interpretation," says George. "These things are, in themselves, necessary to a justly ordered society."

But what is a Supreme Court justice to do when the nation's highest legal authority, the Constitution, is mute on an issue before him? Time and again, Supreme Court justices have overturned laws by appealing to high-sounding notions that reflect their own presuppositions about human nature. Benjamin Cardozo cited "ordered liberty," Felix Frankfurter appealed to "the standards of decency of English-speaking peoples" and-vaguest of all--William O. Douglas found a right to privacy in "the penumbras formed by emanations from the ... Bill of Rights." "Whatever the verbal locution," says legal scholar and federal appeals court Judge John T. Noonan Jr., "the underlying sense has been an appeal to human nature and what that nature demands." Despite the barrage of questions on natural law, Clarence Thomas never revealed how he might make the same appeal if he joins those predecessors on the nation's highest court.

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