Pride Means Protecting What We Love: Marriage Equality Is Still Under Attack

Pride Month is usually the time when we celebrate how far we have come. We gather, march, dance, remember, honor our elders, bring our kids to parades, wear the clothes, wave the flags, and remind the world that LGBTQ+ people are not going anywhere.

But Pride has never only been a celebration.

Pride began as resistance. It has always been part joy, part protest, part survival strategy, and part declaration that we will protect each other when the law, the courts, and the culture decide we are disposable.

So yes, this is a hard article to read coming off of Pride Month. But it is also exactly the kind of article that belongs in a Pride edition, because Pride is not just about being visible. It is about being ready.

Recently, forty-seven (47) anti-LGBTQ+ organizations launched a coordinated campaign called “Greater Than” with one stated goal – to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court case that gave us marriage equality.

The lead organization, Them Before Us, was pulling in under $50,000 a year not long ago. By 2024, their revenue jumped to nearly $1 million, with major funding from The Servant Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Green family. You know them as the founders of Hobby Lobby. That same foundation has poured over $50 million into Alliance Defending Freedom, the firm behind Masterpiece Cakeshop, 303 Creative, and the recent Chiles v. Salazar conversion therapy case.

This is not a loose collection of organizations with similar beliefs. It is a coordinated legal and political campaign. Forty-seven organizations are publicly aligned, sharing messaging, working from the same playbook, and advancing a three-prong strategy.

Marriage is not just a romantic milestone or a piece of paper.  With marriage comes 1,138 state and federal privileges – yes, THAT many!  It affects hospital visitation, inheritance, taxes, parenting, immigration status, healthcare decisions, Social Security benefits, Medicaid, gifting, and who is recognized as family in the moments when recognition matters most.

When marriage equality is threatened, all of that becomes vulnerable.

We have been here before. Long before Obergefell, LGBTQ+ couples and chosen families protected themselves with legal documents because the law did not automatically protect us. We built our own safety nets. We created our own paper trails. We documented our relationships, our wishes, our families, and our decision makers because we had to.

The three prongs of this campaign are clear.

Prong one is legislative. State resolutions urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell are passing in Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. Covenant marriage bills designed to spark a fresh legal challenge are moving in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

Prong two is religious exemption litigation. This network is pushing case after case asking the Court to expand what religious objectors can refuse to do. The current one, St. Mary v. Roy, asks whether a Catholic preschool can take state funding while refusing to serve LGBTQ+ families. The Court will decide it by next summer.

Prong three is Clarence Thomas’s open invitation. In his Dobbs concurrence, he wrote that the Court should reconsider Obergefell. That sentence is the open door. The coordinated campaign’s job is to walk a case through it.

Here is how this unfolds. The Supreme Court does not take up issues on its own. It needs a case in front of it. Kim Davis tried to get one there in 2025. The Court denied her petition in November. That told this network the next vehicle has to be cleaner.

Greater Than is the infrastructure to build it, with a sympathetic plaintiff and a “children’s interests” framing instead of religious liberty.

If they succeed and Obergefell falls, the Respect for Marriage Act, the federal backstop Congress passed in 2022, kicks in. But the Respect for Marriage Act does not recreate full marriage equality in every state. It protects recognition of lawful marriages, but it does not necessarily force every state to issue new same sex marriage licenses if Obergefell is overturned.

It also contains a religious liberty carveout that will be shaped by whatever religious exemption doctrine the Supreme Court has on the books at that moment. The cases this movement has been winning for nearly a decade have been quietly widening that carveout from inside.

So even if the federal floor holds, the day-to-day experience of being married could fragment by state, by provider, and by the religious objector you happen to need to interact with.

That is the legal reality.

But here is the Pride Month reality: we are not powerless.

Pride is not passive. Pride is not waiting for courts to decide whether our families count. Pride is loving loudly, planning carefully, and making sure the people we choose are protected in writing.

There are legal tools that work whether or not Obergefell stands.

Get the 9 essential LGBTQ+ estate planning documents in place: durable power of attorney, healthcare power of attorney with HIPAA authorization, hospital visitation authorization, disposition of remains, will, revocable trust, beneficiary designations, parentage documentation, and chosen family designations. These documents do not depend on whether your state recognizes your marriage.

If you have children, get second parent adoption done. A court order of adoption travels with you in a way a birth certificate alone may not.

Review your existing documents for spousal-only language. If your will or trust says “to my spouse,” and the legal status of “spouse” becomes contestable, your protections can become contestable too. Tighter language matters.

Update gender markers and identity documents now, while you still can in your jurisdiction.

And most importantly, do not confuse celebration with complacency.

This Pride Month, celebrate. Dance. March. Wear the glitter. Tip the drag queens. Bring your children to the parade. Honor the people who fought before us.

Then go home and protect what you love.

You can do this through my firm, Giampolo Law Group, or affordably through LGBTQ+ Pride Planning, the digital platform we built for exactly this moment.

The Greater Than campaign is betting that Pride has become a party without a plan.

Prove them wrong!