Races that could determine the fate of same-sex Virginia marriages are on this year’s ballot

Robert Oliver and Mark Heller (R) hold hands, draped in flags, as they celebrate the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Virginia is about to enter the unofficial final lap of its long race to determine the next tenant of its Executive Mansion. The escalating television ads, the direct mail, the social media bombardments are just starting. Campaign signs sprout on lawns like toadstools.

But it’s the races at the bottom of November’s ballot — for all 100 seats in the House of Delegates — that could portend heartbreaking consequences: potentially the forced dissolution of many thousands of same-sex marriages and the families built on them across the commonwealth.

Amid passionate debate, civil rights resolutions clear Virginia legislature

How, you ask? The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages 10 years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges. It’s settled law.

Roe v. Wade stood for 49 years, guaranteeing a federal legal right to abortions, until a conservative court supermajority, cemented during President Donald Trump’s first term, overturned it in 2022 and made reproductive rights a state-by-state determination.

Now, the justices are considering a request to reconsider and reverse Obergefell from a former Kentucky court clerk once jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The court’s most fringe-right justice, Clarence Thomas, is blunt about his dream of reversing rulings that legalized not only gay marriage but also contraception and even sexual intimacy between consenting adults of the same gender.

Should the court hear the case and, sometime next year, grant Thomas’s sadistic fantasy, the legality of identical-gender marriages would likely devolve to the state legislatures, just as it did with abortion.

Virginia is the only state in the former Confederacy that has resisted severe limits or outright bans on abortion, but it’s not without close calls or for a lack of Virginia Republicans trying. Just a few thousand votes — in key legislative races — preserved abortion rights in Virginia for the past two years.

In 2023, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial PAC raised and spent record sums in his bid to win a Senate majority from the Democrats and retain or expand a thin GOP House majority. But Youngkin also proposed banning abortions after 15 weeks of gestation to the lasting dismay of vulnerable Republicans in decisive races. Democrats kept the Senate and won the narrowest possible House majority: 51 of the 100 seats. Five House races were decided by margins of 2 percentage points or fewer.

In case you’re wondering what this has to do with 2025 House races, let’s review Virginia’s governmental processes.

If Obergefell is overturned, then Article 1, Section 15-A of the Virginia Constitution would control the issue of gay marriage, superseding statutory law. The provision, ratified by voters in 2006, dictates that “only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this Commonwealth and its political subdivisions.” It prevails unless it’s nullified by a subsequent constitutional amendment that specifically permits marriages between individuals of the same sex — like the one working its way through Virginia’s legislative process now.

The process for amending Virginia’s Constitution requires that a resolution establishing the amendment be passed without alteration twice by the state Senate and House with an intervening legislative election between each enactment.

House Joint Resolution 1 passed the House 51-48 and the Senate 21-18 in January on party line votes. The next step is to enact the resolution anew, word-for-word, in the 2026 session, after this fall’s House election. Should the identical measure pass both chambers again, it would be subject to voter ratification in a statewide referendum in the November 2026 election.

Should it fail and should the Supreme Court eliminate protections for same-sex marriage, it could end or hopelessly cloud the marital status for more than 16,000 couples in Virginia, perhaps more. Those numbers are the most recent estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. Because the survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1,923, the figure could be as high as just over 18,000 couples or just over 14,000. There are 1,500 more married same-sex couples in Virginia than there are unmarried, cohabiting same-gender couples, the data show.

The numbers, however, feel sterile unless you know some of the couples whose households could be crushed. For Virginia same-sex spouses like Alex and Sheila, or like Rick and Jay, the prospect of the government stripping away the legal foundation for their union with the most beloved person in their lives is terrifying, flagrantly unjust and cruel beyond reason.

“We are contributing members of society. We’re married and are raising a child. My wife is a public servant. I don’t understand how anyone is threatened by our marriage,” said Sheila, who married Alex 10 years ago, shortly after Obergefell. They live in the Richmond area where Sheila is a human resources professional and Alex is a longtime law-enforcement officer. We spoke for this column last week.

My wife and I befriended Alex and Sheila Kunz 13 years ago and have adored their daughter all of her 12 years. They’re rock-solid, thoughtful neighbors. We rejoiced when Obergefell allowed them to marry. They have instilled character, kindness and a sense of duty and personal responsibility within their child, now a middle-schooler.

“We’re just like you. We have jobs like you. We go to barbecues like you. We’re not … weird, you know?” Alex said. “Now, this (discrimination) coming back is not surprising because, unfortunately … it’s people picking up on the bandwagon of hatred. It’s giving the most extreme reason to hate another group of people.”

I’ve known and respected Jay Timmons for more than 30 years, when he was chief of staff to fellow Reagan Republican George Allen when he was Virginia’s 67th governor in the mid-1990s and, beginning in 2001, its U.S. senator. Now the president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, Jay’s focus is policy, not politics, yet he and Rick Olson feel cornered by the stifling intolerance of today’s GOP.

He and Olson married in California 17 years ago and reside in Fairfax County with their two daughters and a son. After the Obergefell ruling, they dared believe that threats to their marriage were over. But the specter has returned, and they again live dreading events outside their control that opposite-sex couples never feel.

“The question is when is it settled,” Timmons said in an interview last week.

“It’s not even ‘separate-but-equal,’ it’s discrimination based on sex,” Olson said, referring to the rationale for racially segregated public schools that the Supreme Court rejected in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

“Families come in all shapes and sizes. There are single-parent households, there are two-parent households — some same-gender, some opposite-gender. There are households of mixed races (and) mixed religions,” Timmons said.

“I think one of the things that really … makes us unique as humans is that we have the ability to learn and see other perspectives,” he said. “I really don’t judge those people who have a different perspective culturally. I just ask that they let us live our lives.”