Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett confirmed her belief that marriage equality has resulted in “very concrete reliance interests” that make it unlikely to be overturned.

In a conversation with the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, Barrett defined reliance interests as “things that would be upset or undone if a decision is undone.”

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Douthat asked if Obergefell v. Hodges created “social reliance interests in the sense of people making life choices on the basis of a right being protected.”

Coney Barrett said yes, but emphasized the reliance interests in this case are even more significant than Douthat made it seem by calling them social interests.

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“That kind of sounds like in things in the air. Those are very concrete reliance interests,” she said. “So those would be classic reliance interests in the terms of the law, in terms of legal doctrine… Those are financial. Those are medical.”

Earlier in the conversation, Coney Barrett explained that the decision to overturn precedent “is never just is this decision right or wrong.”

“Because if a decision is wrong, then you have to decide whether you should keep it for many of the reasons you say, stability, reliance, interests, et cetera.”

She also pushed back against the idea that the Court frequently overturns precedent, saying that data she asked her law clerks to collect shows that under current Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court has overturned precedent about one time per year. Under former Chief Justices William Rehnquist and Warren Burger, it was closer to two and a half or three times per year.

“So the Court takes precedent quite seriously, and the Court really does not overturn precedent all the time,” she said.

Folks have worried about marriage equality since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the same legal reasoning could also be used to overturn marriage equality. 

Anti-LGBTQ+ Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has also been outspoken about his hatred of the Obergefell decision, though he recently claimed the precedent set by the court’s ruling is “entitled to respect.”

In another recent interview, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the landmark opinion legalizing marriage equality nationwide, also cited reliance while explaining that he doesn’t think the decision is in any danger of being overturned.

“A large part of the reasoning in the opinion, and the background of the opinion, was that I had not known how many children were adopted by [LGBTQ+] parents,” he told CNN in a recent interview. “At first, I thought there were 75,000 children or so. It’s in the hundreds of thousands.”

These families, he said, now have a “substantial reliance” on the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which has granted them stability. If the decision were overturned, Kennedy said it “would be a tremendous reliance problem.”

In the Obergefell opinion, Kennedy outlined the costs of not allowing couples with children to legally marry: “Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life.”

He wrote that the fact that so many children are already being raised in queer households “provides powerful confirmation from the law itself that gays and lesbians can create loving, supportive families.”

Many have been especially worried about Obergefell since the infamous former county clerk Kim Davis recently petitioned the Supreme Court to take her case, which argues that people should be able to refuse recognition of same-sex marriages based on religious beliefs.

Anti-LGBTQ+ advocates hope Davis’ case could be the one to lead the justices to overturn marriage equality. But LGBTQ+ legal experts believe her case is too weak and that it’s far more likely that the court will use free speech and religious freedom claims to roll back queer civil rights.

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