The case that allowed David Nielsen and Scott Poppaw to legally marry, Obergefell v. Hodges, was decided 10 years ago, on June 26, 2015. Nielsen remembers sitting in a conference call at his job at IBM that day, watching the news, waiting for the announcement.
“So in the middle of this conference call with other managers across the country, the Supreme Court issues the ruling,” he said. “I get really excited and say, ‘We can get married!’ And I realized I’m not alone. I just outed myself to this entire group of managers.”
Poppaw takes up the story. “He came home and asked me, ‘You wanna get married?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’ We went down and got the license.”
A week later, on a sunny July 4th afternoon, Nielsen and Poppaw got hitched alongside 40 other couples on the south steps of the Capitol. Friends handed out flowers. Photographers snapped pictures. The photo that ran in the Chronicle shows the couple in a pair of matching rainbow vests painted by Poppaw. After the ceremony, they mingled with the other newlyweds at a reception at the W Hotel. They ended the night watching the fireworks over Lady Bird Lake.
At that point, Nielsen and Poppaw had been together 18 years. They’d dreamed about getting married. “It’s something that’s precious, that we were allowed to experience, that we never thought would ever happen within our lifetimes,” Poppaw said.
The Obergefell decision clarified that the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses give gay couples the same right to marry as straight couples. The amendment has long been used to decide whether different groups of Americans have the same rights as the society at large, as it was in Brown v. Board of Education (which outlawed racial segregation in public schools), Loving v. Virginia (which ended state bans on interracial marriage), and Roe v. Wade (which legalized abortion until it was overturned in 2022).
Obergefell confirmed a range of rights for same-sex couples that heterosexual couples take for granted, including health care rights, parental rights, and inheritance rights. Poppaw, who has been HIV positive for over 30 years, said receiving the health care rights was particularly important to him and Nielsen. Both had friends with AIDS who were not allowed to have their partners with them as they died. “There’s over a thousand different rights and privileges afforded to married couples that you can’t get if you’re not married,” Poppaw said. “Especially, for us, it was just medical issues. If one of us is sick, can the other person advocate for them and direct the medical care?”
“It’s something that’s precious, that we were allowed to experience, that we never thought would ever happen within our lifetimes.” – Scott Poppaw
Nielsen said the fact that their marriage is sanctioned by law made it easier when they took his parents into their home to care for them at the end of their lives. “They both had dementia and couldn’t live on their own,” Nielsen said. “And we were back and forth to the hospital and rehab places many times. And it made Scott’s presence, I think, much more valid to the people there, that he was legally my spouse. He had a say in my parents’ care as much as I did, and he could help direct that if I wasn’t there.”
As they celebrate the 10th anniversary of their marriage, Nielsen and Poppaw are thankful but anxious. When the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court use the same reasoning to consider overturning Obergefell and other landmark decisions legalizing gay sex and the use of contraceptives (though he did not, as Poppaw noted, propose overturning Loving v. Virginia, which protects his interracial marriage). Last week, Thomas was part of the 6-3 majority in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which ruled that a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender children does not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the decision will “do irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause” and that her conservative colleagues had “abandon[ed] transgender children and their families to political whims.”
A vehicle to overturn Obergefell is already working its way through the courts. Kim Davis, a former court clerk from Kentucky, has asked the courts to reverse a $100,000 judgment against her, arguing that she was protected by the First Amendment when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Obergefell decision. Davis’ lawyer, Mat Staver, has promised to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, saying in January that “it’s not a matter of ‘if,’ it’s a matter of ‘when’ Obergefell will be overturned.”
Poppaw said he believes that if the justices overturn Obergefell it could lead to mass strikes and a quick exodus of gay Texans to blue states where same-sex marriage would, presumably, still be legal. But he said no ruling from a court or any other authority can break his bond with Nielsen.
“We’re happy,” Poppaw said. “We’re committed to each other still, and we will be until we’re done. They can’t take that away.”
This article appears in June 27 • 2025.
