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Dianne Hensley, a Waco justice of the peace, filed a federal lawsuit in December 2025 asking courts to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges — the 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. Hensley stopped officiating all marriages in 2015 rather than perform same-sex ceremonies, then resumed in 2016 for opposite-sex couples only — directing same-sex couples to officiants sometimes hours away. The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct reprimanded her in 2019 for casting doubt on her impartiality. She sued, lost in lower courts, but won a partial victory when the Texas Supreme Court rewrote the judicial conduct code to allow religious exemptions.
Her lawyer is Jonathan Mitchell — the architect of Texas’s 2021 SB 8 abortion ban that circumvented Roe v. Wade using private enforcement. Mitchell openly admits no lower court can overturn Obergefell — but is deliberately building a vehicle to bring the question back to the current Supreme Court. Texas has since passed a new rule allowing judges to perform only opposite-sex marriages. The US Supreme Court declined a similar case from Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in November 2025.
Sources: Texas Tribune, LGBTQ Nation, Houston Public Media, PinkNews — October 2025–March 2026
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