LEXINGTON, Ky. — The former Rowan County clerk who was briefly jailed for denying marriage licenses to gay couples a decade ago has again asked the Supreme Court to hear her appeal in hopes of overturning the nationwide right to same-sex marriage.

Kim Davis has persistently fought back against lawsuits filed against her by the couples she denied licenses to. Now, her attorneys with Liberty Counsel are asking the high court to weigh in on three points:

—Whether Davis’ First Amendment religious liberty rights were infringed upon when she was asked to certify marriage certificates for gay couples, since it violated Davis’ evangelical Christian beliefs.

—Whether she has qualified immunity that should shield her from having to pay, now as a private citizen, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to the gay couple who has since sued her.

—And whether the very case that legalized gay marriage in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges, should be overturned.

“This court should revisit and reverse Obergefell for the same reasons articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center,” Mat Staver and other Liberty Counsel attorneys wrote in their 90-page request filed Thursday, referencing the case that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had otherwise preserved the right to an abortion.

“Obergefell was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today because it was grounded entirely on the legal fiction of substantive due process,” they added.

Substantive due process in this context refers to Davis’ claim that because the legalization of same-sex marriage fundamentally infringes on and deprives her of the freedom to assert her religious liberty, the passage of Obergefell was inherently flawed.

A lawyer for David Ermold and David Moore, one of the couples to whom Davis denied a marriage license and who subsequently sued her — the case Davis is asking the Supreme Court to provide an opinion on — did not immediately respond to a Herald-Leader request for comment Thursday.

Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Florida-based “litigation, education and public policy ministry,” argues that Davis was the “first victim” of Obergefell, because she was jailed and sued for standing strong in her “sincerely held religious beliefs on marriage.”

Davis was catapulted to international prominence a decade ago after the high court legalized gay marriage with the Obergefell decision.

Davis, who believes marriage is only a heterosexual union, refused to sign her name to marriage certificates for gay couples in her Eastern Kentucky county. Davis staunchly refused, even when a judge ordered her to continue issuing licenses, since it was her statutory obligation.

She was briefly jailed for contempt, a punishment that amounts to a violation of her religious liberties, Staver has argued. He has claimed that as a public official, Davis had immunity to exercise her religious liberty in place of carrying out her duties to provide marriage licenses as an elected county clerk.

Ermold and Moore sued the former clerk, arguing that her refusal violated their 14th Amendment rights by denying their fundamental right to marry under the court ruling. Ermold and Moore were rejected three times from getting a marriage license. They eventually obtained a marriage license signed by a deputy clerk while Davis was temporarily jailed for violating a court’s orders.

In 2016, after a judge dismissed an initial spate of lawsuits, a jury verdict in 2023 ordered Davis to pay $100,000 to Ermold and Moore, and a separate judgment required her to pay more than $260,000 to cover the cost of the couple’s legal fees — judgments that were upheld by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning in April 2024.

Davis appealed Bunning’s ruling in July 2024, but in March of this year, a three-judge panel on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals denied her request and upheld Bunning’s previous ruling that requires her to pay more than $360,000 in damages.

Davis and her attorneys then asked for the entire slate of appellate judges on the 6th Circuit to review her case. That request for an en banc hearing was denied in April.

The appeal of that hearing is how Liberty Counsel came to petition the Supreme Court Thursday.

The Supreme Court already rejected an appeal from Davis in 2020, and legal experts have told the Herald-Leader this isn’t the likely case to move the needle on gay marriage, in part because the case is almost a decade old, and Davis’ actions as a public employee were clearly unconstitutional.

But Staver is hopeful, he told the Herald-Leader last month, not just because of the conservative majority on the current court has grown since 2020, but because of something Justice Clarence Thomas wrote when justices declined to hear Davis’ case five years ago.

Her case “provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell. By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix,” Thomas wrote. “Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”

On Thursday, Staver said, “We are asking the Court to recognize the First Amendment as an absolute defense for Kim Davis and to overturn the 2015 Obergefell opinion, which has no basis in the Constitution.

The legalization of gay marriage ruling “did significant damage to the historic definition of marriage, to states rights, to religious freedom, and to the rule of law,” Staver added. “It is time to end this legal fiction and undo the damage done.”

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