samuel alito says gay marriage is different from roe because we actually went and got married. the joint checking account is doing the lord's work.

Photo: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Photographer: Steve Petteway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

via CBS News and its extended interview

In 2015 Samuel Alito wrote that people who disagreed with gay marriage would soon have to "whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes." This weekend, in his own words to CBS News, he explained why the ruling he dissented from is sturdier than the one he personally knocked down. The reason is us. We went and got married.

Alito sat for hours with CBS chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford, in his New Jersey hometown and at the Court, ahead of his first book, "So Ordered: An Originalist's View of the Constitution, the Court and Our Country," which is out Tuesday. Most of it is about Dobbs, baseball and his dad. But Crawford asked about Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that made same-sex marriage a constitutional right, and he answered.

what alito said about obergefell

"One of the important factors we take into account in deciding whether we should reexamine a past decision is the degree to which there has been reliance on the decision," he told CBS. "Obviously a great deal had changed in the country as a result of Obergefell. There was a lot of reliance in various ways on the decision in Obergefell."

Then he drew the line between us and Roe. "After Obergefell, people of the same sex got married and entered into contracts," he said, and "it was much more concrete." Roe, by contrast, he called "much more abstract than what would've been involved had we been asked to overrule Obergefell."

In the extended interview he puts it in the past tense: he "did not think that there was any realistic prospect" of it being overruled, "because of the passage of time and the developments in the country since that point."

So, in the view of the justice who wrote the opinion ending Roe, what stands between a married gay couple and the abyss is the mortgage, the shared health insurance and the deeply unromantic paperwork. Every couple who ever argued about whose name goes first on the lease: you were doing constitutional work and you did not even know it.

the part to read twice

This is not a promise, and it is worth being precise about what it is. CBS notes Alito would not say how he would vote if a case came to the Court. Reliance is one factor among several in his telling, not a wall. And the "abstract" line is a slightly startling thing to say about Roe, which was the legal basis for abortion access for nearly half a century, whatever you think of the reasoning.

It also sits next to everything else he has written. His Obergefell dissent warned the ruling would "be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy." In the new book, per CBS, he warns of a "new moral code" that treats people with traditional beliefs about marriage and biological sex as bigots. The Court's religious-liberty docket, which he more or less built, is where the actual fights are now: this term it will hear a Colorado Catholic preschool's case over turning away the children of same-sex parents.

And the last real attempt to reopen Obergefell went nowhere. The Court turned down Kim Davis's petition without comment in November 2025.

So take it for what it is: one of the most influential conservatives on the Court, on camera, saying that gay marriage is now part of how the country is built. We would have preferred "it was right." We will take "it's load-bearing."