Ten years ago, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, declaring that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry in all 50 states. For many Americans, it felt like the close of a bitter chapter—the end of a long legal and cultural war. And for Jim Obergefell, the man whose name now sits atop one of the most significant civil rights rulings in United States history, it felt like the first step toward healing.
Obergefell’s husband, John Arthur, had died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis before the Court ever heard their case. But their love and their fight to have it recognized in their home state of Ohio helped change the law of the land. “John deserved to die a married man,” Obergefell told The Politic.
However, the years that followed the decision have not brought the closure Obergefell once hoped for. Today, Republican support for marriage equality has slipped to just 41 percent. Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and legislation have surged back into national politics. And Obergefell, who once believed the fight might end with that rainbow-lit night in Washington, has found himself still mourning and searching for peace, trying to honor the promises made at the end of his husband’s life.
This conversation took place on July 25, 2025—the same day President Donald J. Trump and the White House released a statement applauding Yale New Haven Health for cutting youth gender-affirming care services. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
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For readers who are unfamiliar with your story with John, could you please walk us through it?
John and I met in 1992. We became a couple on New Year’s Eve 1992, going into 1993, and we built our life together in Cincinnati.
We talked about marriage early on, in the mid-’90s. We didn’t want some pale approximation of marriage, a symbolic ceremony, a civil partnership, a domestic partnership. We wanted marriage. We just thought that it would never happen. Back in the mid-’90s, that wasn’t a possibility anywhere. And living in Ohio on top of it—Ohio was one of the many states that passed its own state-level Defense of Marriage Act in 2004.
We expected decades together, and we ended up having a little over two decades. Things took a turn that we weren’t expecting in 2011 when John was diagnosed with ALS, and it progressed fairly quickly. He was diagnosed in June of 2011, and by April 2013, we made the decision to start at-home hospice care. I was his full-time caregiver because that was important to both of us. We did not want to put John in a facility where we had no idea how he would be treated as an out gay man, so we started at-home hospice care, and hospice nurses came about five hours a week total. The rest of the time, I took care of him. I just always looked at it as: this is what you do when you love someone. We’d never been able to get married, but we had promised each other that we would love and care for each other no matter what. It didn’t matter how tiring, overwhelming, or scary it was to take care of someone who was losing all their physical abilities. I was going to do that.
And then things really changed. On June 26, 2013, I was standing next to his bed, holding his hand as we watched the news, when word came from the Supreme Court that, in United States v. Windsor, they had struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. We hadn’t talked about marriage since the mid-’90s because we had just given up, but as that news sank in, I realized: here’s our opportunity. We could get married. At least the federal government would see us, recognize us, and treat us as a married couple, which is what we had wanted for so long. So, I spontaneously proposed, and John said yes. The challenge was then, “Here we are in Cincinnati.” We can’t get married in Ohio. I couldn’t take him six blocks to the county courthouse to get a marriage license and get married at home, where he’s safe and comfortable. We had to go somewhere else, and we had to figure out where to go and how to get there.
I started researching places and very quickly learned that Maryland was the only state that did not require both of us to appear in person to apply for a marriage license. I decided this is where we were going because my whole goal was to keep John as safe and as comfortable as possible during this process. All we had to do was go to Maryland together simply to get married.
I also called John’s aunt, Paulette; her nickname is Tootie. She had told us years before, “You guys represent marriage better than any other couple I know, and if you can ever get married, I would love to be the one to do it.” After John said yes, the first thing I did was call her and say, “Hey, Tootie, does that offer still stand? Would you officiate?” She said, “Of course. You tell me when, you tell me where, nothing will prevent me from being there.”
So, we know where we’re going. We know who’s going to officiate, but how do we get there? I wasn’t willing to put John in his wheelchair and drive from Cincinnati to Maryland in our minivan. That would have been incredibly painful for him. Same thing with taking an ambulance. But I couldn’t take him to the Cincinnati airport and fly Delta or American. He had no physical abilities, so our option was a chartered medical jet. I started getting quotes on that, and it was something we couldn’t afford. But I thought, “Well, you know what? Maybe somebody knows somebody.” So I went to Facebook, and I simply posted, John and I are going to fly to Maryland to get married. We have to charter a medical jet. Does anyone have a contact? I just thought maybe somebody knew somebody who would help mitigate the cost. Well, our family and friends commented, “No, Jim, we don’t know anyone. We can’t help that way, but you and John deserve to get married, and we want to help make it happen. So please accept this gift of money.” Our family and friends covered the entire $14,000 cost of the chartered medical jet.
So, on July 11, 2013, John and I, along with Tootie, took an ambulance to the Cincinnati Municipal Airport and boarded this tiny medical jet with two pilots and a nurse. We flew to Baltimore, Washington International Airport. We landed, parked on the tarmac, and we got to say, “I thee, wed.” That was all we wanted—to get married. We wanted John to die as a married man. We had no plans to do anything—we just wanted to get married and to live out his remaining days as husband and husband.
When we flew to Baltimore, that Facebook post had also prompted a friend of ours—who was on the editorial board of the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper—to reach out and say, “Hey guys, I saw Jim’s post. I’ve been trying to get the paper to come out in support of marriage equality,” because there were so many things happening with marriage equality nationwide at that point. She said, “I want the paper to come out in support of it. What would you think about having me write an article about what you’re doing to get married?” We knew her, we trusted her, we respected her, so we said, okay.
So, on the chartered medical jet, we were joined by one other person, a photographer and videographer that she sent on the airplane with us. Two days after we got married, the story she wrote about us came out online. That Saturday, other friends were at a party, both attorneys, and they ran into a friend of theirs, a civil rights attorney, Al Gerhardstein, in Cincinnati. He knew nothing about us, and they shared our story. He then left the party without telling his wife, went to his office, and searched through his filing cabinets for a specific piece of paper. When he found it, he reached out to us through mutual friends to say, “John, Jim, you don’t know me. I’m a civil rights attorney.” He said, “I would like to meet. Would you be open to that?” So on Tuesday, five days after we got married, he came to our home. He pulled out that sheet of paper he had found, and it was a blank Ohio death certificate. He said, “Do you guys understand that when John dies, his last record as a person, his last record as an Ohioan, will be wrong. Because of Ohio’s state-level Defense of Marriage Act, they will ignore your lawful marriage. In Maryland, when they fill this out here, where it says marital status at time of death, they will say John was unmarried, and this field here for the name of the surviving spouse, Jim, your name won’t be there.”
He asked us if we wanted to do something about it. We talked for less than a minute and said yes. Eight days after we got married, we filed suit in federal district court. Eleven days after we got married, because of John’s health, the judge cleared his docket, and I was in court that day for the hearing. Later, the judge ruled in our favor and said, “Ohio, when John dies, you must fill out his death certificate correctly.”
Three months later to the day, John died, but he died a married man. From there, of course, it was appealed, and we ended up at the Supreme Court.
Looking back now, going to the Supreme Court with your case, what do you think was the most emotionally or legally draining part of the whole process? What was that experience like?
The most emotionally challenging part of that for me was when John died. Not surprisingly, here was the love of my life. We’d been together almost 21 years, and we’d only been lawfully married for three months, something we wanted for almost 20 years. I knew he was going to die. Everybody dies, but when you know someone is dealing with ALS, you know the end is coming. Then, having the state of Ohio say, “Well, now that John’s dead, we’re going to appeal,” and the anger that I felt when they made that decision, even still today, I just don’t understand. How did our marriage harm anyone else? How did it harm the state? It didn’t.
Then, just figuring out, “Well, what’s my life going to be like without him?” He died in October 2013, and for most of 2014, I kind of ran away—other than when I had to be in court at the Sixth Circuit. I traveled, and I honestly couldn’t stand being at home in Cincinnati, because I saw John everywhere I went. That was tough, but it was also one of those things where I’m going to keep fighting. No matter what, I will keep fighting because I promised John that I would love, honor, and protect him. If I don’t keep fighting, I’m not living up to my promises.
You made that promise to John, and in that moment, did you think that your job would be done? Did you believe that you had fulfilled your promise and that what you had done would be permanent?
Yes, because I grew up at a time—and up until a few years ago—when we were told by our history, by attorneys, by our government, by the justices on the Supreme Court, that precedent matters. That they consider previous decisions as precedent, as settled law.
So, on one hand, from the legal part of things, from the right to marry and have our marriages recognized, I thought we were done. I knew we would continue having to fight the battle in society, deal with people who continually try to undermine, deny, or harm our marriages, our families, our relationships. But I thought the Supreme Court had ruled that we have the right to marry the person we love.
But we know better now. The Supreme Court no longer believes in precedent. We have two Supreme Court justices who have come out and said, point-blank, that they want to overturn Obergefell—even though one of those justices’ very own marriages exists because of a Supreme Court decision.
Do you think the American legal system still functions as a safeguard for civil rights today?
It has changed. In my opinion, we have a Supreme Court that is now in the back pocket of the current president. We have a Supreme Court in which many justices adhere to what I believe is an incredibly harmful and dangerous way of approaching the Constitution—originalism. That philosophy, that approach to our Constitution, all it guarantees is that we remain stuck in the past.
It amazes me that any current person can think that they know what was intended by, or in the hearts and minds of, people 200 years ago. To say that we can only interpret the law based on the time it was written—okay. Well, if that’s the game you want to play, let’s talk about the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment says, “well-regulated.” You ignore that. And the people who wrote that could never have imagined a gun that could shoot hundreds of rounds in a minute.
So, if originalism is the way you want to go, be consistent and apply it everywhere. But they don’t. They only apply it in those situations when it’s something they personally don’t like. And with marriage, it’s because of their religion. We have the right—as citizens of this country, as human beings—to have judges and justices who make decisions without letting their personal religious beliefs carry more weight than the law.
This interview comes at a very interesting time, because yesterday, Yale and Connecticut announced they had just ended gender-affirming care. Considering these actions: the shutdown of LGBTQ federal hotlines, the removal of Harvey Milk’s name from the Navy ship, attacks on inclusive education, book bans, do you think that marriage equality could once again be something that’s on the chopping block very soon?
Absolutely. All it takes is the right case getting in front of the right judge, appointed by the current president. They overturned Roe, and that was precedent for 49 years. Gay marriage has only been here for ten years. If the Supreme Court doesn’t care about precedent, then others can say, “I’m not going to care about precedent.” That’s all it’s going to take.
And I haven’t read the details, I just saw the headlines, but I couldn’t even bring myself to read it. Kim Davis is once again directly asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. So, absolutely, marriage is at risk. People who think it isn’t are fooling themselves. All civil rights are at risk.
Since 2015, you’ve suffered loss and many challenges, but you’ve also gained a lot: seeing the youth rising into their own. How do you feel about those stories of the youth who found their voices in the last ten years?
I love it. I love that there’s been a whole generation of people who have grown up in a world where they never had to question their ability or their right to marry the person they love. But, I hope now they realize that right isn’t as secure as they thought it was. Our nation is stronger because of marriage equality, because our families are stronger. Our children are growing up in—again, keep in mind, I’m kind of ignoring reality of current things—but in general, kids are growing up in a world that’s more supportive of differences, more supportive of the queer community. I love that I was part of making things better for people who come after us. And I haven’t been one of those people who get angry when young queer people don’t know what Obergefell v Hodges is. They grew up at a time when marriage was just a right. It’s just been something that they have that’s been part of their possible future. Would I want queer history to be more well-known? Absolutely. But I’m not gonna judge a young person because I say Obergefell v Hodges and they don’t immediately know what it is. It’s nice knowing that something that you see as a guarantee wasn’t threatened—that it isn’t something you have to worry about.
What would you say to these young people who are part of the LGBTQ community, who have been coming of age with this guarantee up until now, but are now in this moment of backlash?
Do not take any of the rights or the future you see for yourself today for granted. There are people, elected officials, judges, and justices who are doing everything they can to take those rights away from you—to deny you the future you thought you had. Every single right we enjoy is at risk. We’ve already lost one in that Dobbs decision. And when we lose one right, all rights are at risk. So, know that what you thought your future could be is at risk, and be a part of making sure you have that ability to live that future.
Be informed. There were hundreds of years in our nation’s history where gay marriage was not a right, and there were countless people who risked everything, not just for marriage, but for the right to work for the government as a queer person. Know your history, and try to do what you can to understand the long fight the queer community has been part of just to be a part of our society and live life on a more equal basis.
Vote in every single election. Sometimes it’s easy for people to think, “Oh, nobody I voted for won, so why should I bother?” Well, you need to bother. Voting is the only way for our voices to be heard. If we don’t vote, we’re letting other people make those decisions. Don’t expect 100% agreement with any candidate. You don’t agree 100% with your partner, your parents, or your best friend, but there will be at least one candidate who most closely aligns with your values. Use your voice in your state legislatures. Use your voice in school board meetings. Your voice is the only thing you have that really makes a difference in this country. If you’re not using it, you’re letting other people’s voices make those decisions for you.