Since marriage equality became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, thanks to the landmark Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision, I have officiated more than 250 LGBTQ+ weddings as a minister. Each ceremony has been an honor.
During an interview marking Massachusetts’s twentieth anniversary of marriage equality in 2024, a reporter asked to see photos of the LGBTQ+ weddings I had officiated—I had hundreds. I sorted the photos into three groups: couples who are now deceased, couples who have since divorced, and couples who are still together. It was a simple but powerful reminder that LGBTQ+ couples are like any other couple—some of us stay together, some get divorced, and others become widowed. Society takes our coupling out of the context of being seen as normal, making our relationships “othered.” But we are all fundamentally alike in many ways.
What I never imagined, however, is that there might come a day when I would have to stop officiating these weddings.
Under President Donald Trump, marriage equality is on the rocks. The Trump Administration’s employment of “theopolitics,” or the intersection of religious beliefs and political power, has shaped its attacks on LGBTQ+ Americans and fueled a wave of restrictive federal and state legislation targeting our community. While overall public support for LGBTQ+ rights remains strong, the deleterious effects of theopolitics on high-profile issues in the news, such as marriage equality, have become deeply polarizing and often framed as conflicts over religious freedom.
The fear among LGBTQ+ people is palpable. With this threat looming large, many LGBTQ+ couples are now dashing to the altar, fearing they may soon lose their right to marriage—and the protection that marriage brings. There are currently 1,138 federal benefits and hundreds of state-specific benefits granted to married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns, make medical decisions if a spouse is incapacitated, and qualify for family health insurance rates. Couples in states that stopped recognizing same-sex marriages would not get those same benefits.
Denying these benefits would cause financial instability and immense stress. “Being a widow, all the federal benefits have benefited me,” my friend Pat, who is queer and lives in West Palm Beach, Florida, tells me. “I’m on spousal Social Security and not paying taxes on our joint money.” Now Pat has to worry about whether that will change.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to those already married,” Pat says. “What would that be? A forced divorce?”
This uncertainty is shaping personal decisions. “I told my nephew, who’s gay and only twenty-two, to get married last year because we just don’t know what’s coming,” Pat says.
In April 2025, I married an elderly lesbian couple who had been together for decades and had never felt the need to get legally hitched. It was a sudden request: They had been planning a trip out of the country, and were worried about being able to be by each other’s side if one of them landed in the hospital. Since Trump began his second term, I’ve seen other older couples who hadn’t gotten married because they never thought they would need to, suddenly worried about making their relationship legally official.
“We are worried with this government not acknowledging us around health and estate issues when one of us falls ill or dies,” one of them told me at the time. “Since we’re older now, this is a good time to acknowledge the state of things, as we’re unmarried and growing into old age together.”
The intersection of religious doctrine and political power has long been used to shape and oppose unions between same-sex couples. Even after Obergefell v. Hodges established the nationwide right for same-sex couples to marry in 2015, it has never felt entirely secure to the queer community. Many religious conservatives define marriage as a union between one cisgender man and one cisgender woman, describing it as God’s will and drawing on the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve. Yet while the Book of Genesis presents their union, it does not depict God performing a marriage ceremony or explicitly mandating heterosexual coupling—only offering His blessing.
Despite this, the belief that marriage is exclusively a heterosexual enterprise continues to surface in anti-queer rhetoric, often visible at rallies and churches where opponents display placards with slogans such as “God made Adam for Eve, not Steve!”
In 2015, after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell instituted national marriage equality, a Kentucky county clerk named Kim Davis gained global attention when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on the grounds that she was acting “under God’s authority.” Davis sued in federal court, arguing her religious faith should exclude her from the law—a case she unsuccessfully tried to take up to the Supreme Court. In response to the rejection from the Supreme Court, Davis called the case a “matter of religious liberty,” adding that she “never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage . . . . It is a heaven or hell decision.” She continued, “To me this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s word.” She was subsequently sued by same-sex couples to whom she denied marriage licenses.
In July 2025, Davis formally petitioned the Court to reconsider Obergefell. Though she was again unsuccessful, the prospect of more local officials like Kim Davis using lawsuits to curtail LGBTQ+ rights is deeply unsettling.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also works to undermine marriage equality. In his dissenting opinion in Obergefell, Thomas characterized the decision as having “potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty” and stated that marriage is “not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well.” Declaring that churches would be “confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples,” Thomas cited Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in describing marriage as “between man and wife.”
In 2020, Davis had petitioned the Supreme Court to stop the case brought against her by the LGBTQ+ couples she refused to issue marriage licenses for. When the Court denied her petition, Thomas wrote in a statement that “due to Obergefell, those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul of Obergefell and its effect on other antidiscrimination laws.” He added that Obergefell left “those with religious objections in the lurch.”
The Supreme Court overturned the Constitutional right to abortion in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Thomas seized on the Dobbs decision to call for the revisiting of other landmark rulings. In his concurring opinion, he argued that the Court has a duty to “correct the error” of past precedents and should reconsider decisions protecting contraception, same-sex intimacy, and marriage equality. Surely, he was jesting, I thought. The irony is striking: Thomas himself is in an interracial marriage, the right to which was established by a legal doctrine upon which same-sex marriage equality is also built (Loving v. Virginia). This slippery slope is one he, too, could confront, should the Court eliminate federal protection for loving whomever you choose. Many of the civil rights gains that enabled his rise to the nation’s highest court are now under threat from his own judicial philosophy.
African Americans have long had a fraught relationship with the institution of marriage. Marriage equality in the United States has always been, in part, a Black issue. Interracial marriages between Black and white Americans were illegal in many states until the Loving decision in 1967; vestiges of those anti-miscegenation laws still linger symbolically in some state constitutions. During slavery, African Americans were denied the legal right to marry. Instead, we created our own traditions—most notably “jumping the broom”—to honor and consecrate our nuptials until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Today we do it in homage to our ancestors and transcestors.
Within many Black communities, the fight for LGBTQ+ marriage equality has been a hot-button issue. During the civil rights era, many Black activists viewed the gay liberation movement with skepticism; it was a white one, and it excluded people of color. Many Black ministers marched with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. but opposed LGBTQ+ rights. Some saw it as an appropriation of the Civil Rights Movement.
In 2004, a group of Black pastors in Atlanta, Georgia, signed a declaration supporting a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, stating, “To equate a lifestyle choice to racism demeans the work of the entire Civil Rights Movement. People are free in our nation to pursue relationships as they choose. To redefine marriage, however, to suit the preference of those choosing alternative lifestyles is wrong.”
More than a decade later, in May 2015, a Pew Research Center study found that 57 percent of Black Protestants opposed gay marriage. Three years later, rightwing conservative Black minister Jesse Lee Peterson said same-sex couples were “not mentally capable” of raising children, adding that “two women together as husband and wife is not a normal situation.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, was an early advocate for the LGBTQ+ community—especially Black LGBTQ+ people—at a time when we had no one. He offered hope when family, church, and society turned their backs on us. His Rainbow Coalition brought national visibility to constituencies many politicians regarded as liabilities—among them feminists and LGBTQ+ Americans.
Jackson was among the first Black ministers and political leaders to promote AIDS education and prevention. He worked to destigmatize the virus by becoming one of the first Black clergy members to be publicly tested. He also mobilized fellow clergy to action, reframing HIV/AIDS as a public health crisis rather than a moral failing tied to LGBTQ+ identity. And he supported same-sex marriage. At a rally outside the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California, in December 2010, he stated, “Marriage is based on love and commitment—not on sexual orientation. I support the right for any person to marry the person of their choosing.” However, like many Black Americans, he strongly objected to comparing the LGBTQ+ rights movement to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
But this conservatism is by no means exclusive to the Black Church. Take televangelist Jerry Falwell, who told PBS Frontline in 2000 that “marriage begins when a man and woman legally marry. No other diverse family form is mentioned in Scripture and in Western civilization . . . . Any time you live outside the marriage bond in a sexual way, you’re violating the Scriptures.” In June 2025, Southern Baptist delegates voted to ban same-sex marriage, and called on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.
Having been raised in the Black Church, I know that many conservative congregations still refuse to officiate same-sex marriages to this day. For Black Americans who feel they are still fighting for full access to mainstream society, it can seem as though white LGBTQ+ people, because of their privilege, have already secured rights that remain out of their reach. However, this perspective has obscured a deeper issue: a limited understanding of how the tentacles of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy operate across identities. Its impact is not confined solely to Black heterosexual men; it also shapes the lives of Black women and Black LGBTQ+ people, often overlapping and crushing in compounded ways. Ignoring the intersectionality of this complexity can reinforce divisions rather than address shared struggles for justice.
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans should be unquestioned. Our rights have never been simply granted—they have been fought for against systems designed to marginalize and erase us.
We must stand firm in the face of renewed challenges to defend hard-won freedoms and continue the struggle for full equality. We have resisted before, and we have prevailed. We can—and must—do so again.