Former Trump campaign senior advisor, lobbyist, and CNN commentator David Urban attacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for trying “to sow fear and discontent” by saying that the Supreme Court could overturn marriage equality.

“If you keep telling us the sky is falling, eventually people will stop listening,” Urban wrote in a USA Today column this week. “Marriage equality isn’t in danger. Were that to change, Americans on the left, center, and right would come to its defense.”

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“The country deserves better.”

Urban, who advised on Trump’s 2016 campaign for president, was referring to comments Clinton made in August on the Raging Moderates podcast, where she said that the Supreme Court “will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion. They will send it back to the states.”

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She then told “anybody in a committed relationship out there in the LGBTQ community… You ought to consider getting married. Because I don’t think they’ll undo existing marriages, but I fear that they will undo the national right, and so, fewer than half of the states will recognize gay marriage.”

Urban took issue with that, citing a survey from Republican pollsters at Centerline America who found that 72% of registered voters this past June said they support marriage equality (that support dropped to 61% when people were allowed to pick “undecided” as an answer). He said that even a majority of Republicans support marriage equality, citing a poll from The Hill, although a poll from Gallup this year shows that only a minority of Republicans do, and their support has been decreasing since 2022.

Urban also discussed the legal case that people are worried the Court will use to overturn Obergefell, Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis’ lawsuit. Legal experts have generally said that the case isn’t a good vehicle for overturning Obergefell, and Urban cites a conservative legal scholar who said that overturning Obergefell would be unlikely because the Court would be “destroying marriages and undoing family relationships.” Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett made a similar argument earlier this month, and even Clinton said that she didn’t believe that the Court would break apart marriages, just stop requiring states to continue to perform marriages for same-sex couples.

But Urban’s goal with his piece wasn’t to assure LGBTQ+ people that marriage equality is safe; it was to attack Democrats for bringing it up in the first place (he cited no major Democrats who have expressed concern for marriage equality other than Clinton, who was asked about it on a podcast): “The ‘chicken little’ warnings aren’t grounded in reality.”

“So why raise the specter of rights being torn away when the law and the culture are moving in the opposite direction? Because fear works. Fear raises money. Fear keeps Americans angry, divided, and distrustful,” the former Trump campaign advisor wrote.

He then said that there are “important debates ahead over religious liberty, over equal treatment under the law, and they matter.” Davis’ lawsuit is about religious rights, and religious freedom was also the reason cited by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in their 2020 dissenting opinion calling for the Court to end marriage equality.

“The law is being followed,” Urban wrote. His piece was published just three days after Texas moved to allow county judges to refuse to marry same-sex couples.

Transgender rights are under much heavier attack than marriage equality and have been for the past several years, and LGBTQ+ legal experts don’t think that marriage is in any immediate danger.

The Supreme Court is set to decide next month whether it will even hear Davis’ appeal. The Court gets about 10,000 petitions a year asking it to deliberate on various cases — the court agrees to hear only 75 to 85 of these cases, according to The Judicial Learning Center. Even Bill Powell, the lawyer representing the same-sex couple in Davis’ case, thinks the Supreme Court won’t hear her case.

“Not a single judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals showed any interest in Davis’ rehearing petition, and we are confident the Supreme Court will likewise agree that Davis’ arguments do not merit further attention,” Powell said.

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