Alito and Thomas write long opinion criticizing Obergefell

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Alito and Thomas gonna Alito and Thomas.

What would a case to overturn Obergefell even look like? A deep-non-Atlas-red state would have to start by re-banning SSM by statute in order for anybody to have standing, and I don't see the political will for that materializing even in the Bible Belt.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

These two guys are an embarrassment to the SC. You know you’re a bad Justice when you make Trump’s nominations look good.

I don't think Thomas is an embarrassment to the Court as such, he just has an extreme and somewhat idiosyncratic philosophy; so did, for example, William O. Douglas in the other direction.

Alito, on the other hand, is the platonic ideal of a GOP hatchet man unconvincingly posing as an impartial jurist.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Under the language of Obergefell, the Court suggested that traditional Christian values are legally tantamount to discrimination against homosexuals.  That requires the Court to carve-out wide religious liberty exceptions for individuals, businesses and NGOs going forward in order to just maintain basic free exercise protections.  That is, I believe, what Thomas means by "a problem that only [the Court] can fix."

I don't share the reflexive opposition to any and all conscience exemptions that many other LGBT people have, but it's been established since Reynolds v. United States in the late nineteenth century that the First Amendment protects all religious belief but not all religiously motivated behavior.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Obergefell won't be overturned, but it's quite clear that there are 'disputes' which still remain (& which at least 2 & possibly 3 justices in a month's time are still willing to hear) with regards to how LGBTQ+ individuals are treated as a protected class when compared to religious beliefs (e.g., Masterpiece Cake).

Nevertheless, for people who claim to believe in a plain reading of the Constitution, it sure seems strange to see them continually trying to tack "except for gay people" onto the 14th Amendment.

I think it's a genuine balancing act, because free exercise and equal protection are both constitutionally enumerated rights. Legal theories on both sides that attempt to establish one as somehow "more enumerated" than the other are specious. The only way to cut that knot is to argue that sexual orientation shouldn't be a protected category for equal protection purposes at all, which is a straightforwardly cruel position at this point.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The position that, if we're going to have civil marriage, a textualist reading of the equal protection clause mandates that it be gender-neutral does not inherently presuppose the position that entering into a civil marriage is itself an unenumerated constitutional right, Mark, any more than the position that not allowing women to have bank accounts was an equal protection violation presupposed an unenumerated constitutional right to have a bank account.