He was at the center of a Supreme Court case that changed gay marriage. Now, he's worried.

USA Today

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He was at the center of a Supreme Court case that changed gay marriage. Now, he's worried.
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Jim Obergefell talks LGBTQ+ rights 10 years after Supreme Court ruling
Jim Obergefell, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage nationwide, looks back on its impact 10 years later.
When Jim Obergefell was sitting in the gallery at the Supreme Court on June 26, 2015, he was waiting to hear his name. The justices were preparing to rule on Obergefell v. Hodges, a case that became a landmark in the progress toward LGBTQ+ rights in the U.S. The case, which considered the rights of same-sex couples to marry, ultimately won favor with a majority of the justices, but for Obergefell, the moment wasn't, and could never be, totally complete.
His husband, John Arthur, died years before the ruling was announced.
Now, 10 years on, he sat down with USA TODAY to reflect on how their love for each other helped shape the fight for marriage equality in the U.S., and what progress there is to still be made in the fight for equality.
Obergefell and Arthur met in 1992 and became engaged in 1993. That's when their journey as marriage equality pioneers first began – and for Obergefell, continues into the present.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: You got engaged with a traditional diamond ring, even though there was no formal option for marriage. What did that ring mean to you in 1993?
Answer: You know, that diamond ring signified you're the person I choose. You're the person I want to spend my life with, and we don't have the ability to do anything legal, but at least you know that's how I feel.
And from there, what was your journey to get married?
John and I just built a life together. We bought our first house. We built a great circle of friends and family in Cincinnati, people who saw us and treated us as a couple, as a committed couple.
It wasn't until 2011 that things really took an unexpected turn. John was diagnosed with ALS. Instead of seeing a few decades more together, we knew our time together was limited to two to five years or less. John progressed fairly rapidly, and by April of 2013 he started at home hospice care.
We could have put him in a facility, but we had to think about things that other couples didn't have to think about. How would he be treated as a gay man in a facility? How would I be treated as his partner of almost 21 years? We had nothing legal, no rights and we made the decision: Let's do at-home hospice care because that meant I could keep him safe and comfortable.
At what point did you really start to feel like you needed to fight for this for legal marriage recognition?
On June 26, 2013, I was standing next to his bed holding his hand when news came out from the Supreme Court that with their decision in the United States v. Windsor, they struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. That was that law that defined marriage as between only one man and one woman. And we hadn't talked about marriage again since the mid-90s. But as that news was sinking in, I realized, wait, we've always wanted to get married. Here's our chance we could get married and at least have the federal government see us, recognize us, treat us as a married couple.
So I spontaneously proposed and he said, yes.
How did you go from this discussion to eventually suing the state and ultimately winding up in the Supreme Court?
Because we lived in Ohio, which had its own state-level Defense of Marriage Act, we couldn't get a marriage license or get married at home.
Through the generosity of our family and friends, they covered the cost of a chartered medical jet. And we flew from Cincinnati to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on July 11, 2013. We stayed in that medical jet (on the tarmac). And I got to take his hand, and we got to say "I do."
A local civil rights attorney read about our story in the Cincinnati Enquirer, and he reached out through mutual friends to say, 'hey, I would like to come talk to you because you have a problem you probably haven't thought about.'
Five days after we got married, Al Gerhardstein came to our home and he pulled out a blank Ohio death certificate.
'When John dies, this document, his last record as a person, will be wrong,' he said, 'because here, where it says marital status at time of death, Ohio will fill this out and say that John was unmarried. In the space for surviving spouse name, Jim, your name won't be there.'
John and I knew Ohio wouldn't recognize our marriage. But that was abstract. That document, knowing that John's last record would be wrong, made that abstract understanding real. And it hurt. It made us angry.
So when (Al) said, 'Do you want to do something about it?' (John and I) talked about it for less than a minute and said yes.
So that was Tuesday, five days after we got married. On Friday, eight days after we got married, we filed a lawsuit in federal district court suing the governor of Ohio, John Kasich, and the attorney general, Mike DeWine.
Because of John's health, the federal judge had to clear his docket, and he heard arguments on the case on Monday, 11 days after we got married. And that very day, he ruled in our favor. And then John died three months later to the day, but he died a married man.
So the record was correct at his time of death. And your name is on his death certificate, but the the fight didn't stop there. The judge ruled in your favor, but it went on to an appeal and got overturned. How did you decide at that point, once the record was correct in your paperwork, that you were going to keep on with the fight?
When Al said, 'do you want to keep fighting?' my immediate answer was, 'of course I do.' If I don't, I'm not living up to my promises to John. I promised to love, honor and protect him. And if I don't keep fighting this to make sure our marriage can't be erased, then I'm failing in my promises.
How did gay marriage become legal? Civil unions in this state paved the way 25 years ago.
I've seen in other interviews you've said that you never really considered yourself an activist. So how did you go from Jim from Ohio, to suing the state of Ohio and becoming a gay rights figurehead?
It's because of John, because we loved each other and we wanted to exist.
Learning that our right to call each other husband and to have it mean something wasn't going to be reflected on his death certificate, it broke our hearts, but I think the more important thing is it really made us angry.
I loved John. He loved me back. We finally had the chance to say I do. But then understanding how our home state, the state where I was born and raised, would completely disregard us, made me angry, made us both angry.
It's amazing what will happen when you love someone enough, when you're willing to fight for what you know is right.
You were in D.C. the day the decision came down, like, what was that experience like, and what were you thinking about?
I thought about John missing him, loving him.
I thought about so many people who I had met over the course of the case, the people who were coming up to me and sharing photos and telling me stories and talking about what this potential decision meant to them and what it meant to the person they loved.
And then just the unexpected realization that for the first time in my life as a gay man, I actually felt like an equal American. I wasn't expecting to feel that, and that was a really beautiful realization. I feel equal.
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And now you are in the history books. What does that feel like?
When I really feel the the importance of this is every single time someone stops me, hugs me, starts crying, shares photos of their family, of their spouse, of their child, and tells me stories. It's a gift every single time it happens, because I see in their faces what marriage equality meant to them, to their family, to their loved ones.
Are you nervous that Obergefell might be overturned one day? And what do you think the biggest fight our community faces right now is?
Yes, I'm worried about marriage equality.
If Obergefell is overturned, we go back to a time or a place where a queer couple in Ohio, where I live, might want to get married, but Ohio could refuse to issue a marriage license because Ohio still has a state level Defense of Marriage Act on the books.
Our biggest challenge is making sure we don't lose the progress we have made.
We have to be fighting together to make sure every marginalized community keeps the rights that they have gained. We can't do this alone. We have to be fighting for every marginalized community, not just ours. And unfortunately, right now, the trans community, they're bearing the brunt of it.
What do you tell young people now, given all of the challenges that we just discussed, what do you say to give them continued hope?
The most important thing is they're not alone. There are countless people like me who are activists, who are involved, who care and are out there fighting on the street, in our state legislatures, in the halls of government. There are millions of people out there who believe in their humanity, in their dignity and their right to a future.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at [e-mail].