THV11 | Future for same-sex marriage in Arkansas still uncertain 10 years after historic ruling
June 26, 2025 at 6:42 p.m.
by Lauren Johnston
Pride Month is a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ community in all its forms. It's a time to make a statement and highlight showstopping creativity and fierce talent.
It's a party, but it's also a riot, because that's how the first Pride really began.
In June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn — a not-so-underground gay bar in New York City.
Raids happened frequently, since the laws at the time criminalized being gay. But on that night in '69, the people turned the Stonewall raid into a riot, which turned into a gay rights revolution.
In the decades since, the fight for equality hasn't stopped in America, or in Arkansas, especially when it comes to the legal right to marry who you love.
So, how did we get to today?
On Election Night in 2004, the Natural State went red for George W. Bush, helping elect him to his second term in the White House. Like many other states that year, Arkansas also asked voters to define marriage.
Voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to officially define marriage as between one man and one woman in the state, banning any same-sex unions.
Then in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 federal law that banned same-sex marriage.
It was a move that UA Little Rock Professor of Law Joshua Silverstein said got the ball rolling everywhere.
"There was just an avalanche of litigation with the vast majority of courts around the country ruling that same sex marriage was protected," Silverstein described.
A year later, in Arkansas, Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Chris Piazza, amid lawsuits from local couples, ruled against the state's ban from 2004, calling it unconstitutional.
For the next week, while the legal debates raged, the race to get married was on for same-sex couples. County courthouses flooded with people not wanting to miss the chance to secure a legal marriage license before the window closed once again.
However, on June 26, 2015, the fight at the state level became moot.
In Obergefell V. Hodges, SCOTUS ruled the right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples under the U.S. Constitution, legalizing same-sex marriage across the country.
Back to the present, where Pride Month brought hundreds of people out to Little Rock's SOMA neighborhood in early June, including newlyweds Whitney Butler and Viktoria Capek.
After their engagement, they planned a small wedding ceremony for May. Months before, on the heels of the 2024 Presidential Election, they say they felt the need to take a more proactive approach.
"Should we go ahead and get married? Should we wait?" Butler wondered.
"So one random Friday afternoon, we met a judge in Benton and got married legally. This is not going to be our wedding date. This isn't going to be a day of an anniversary, but this is just going to be a day where we solidified the joy and kind of took ownership of the fear," she said.
That fear of what could happen, even after a decade of marriage equality in the U.S., is something Professor Silverstein said is not unfounded.
"I think that Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would clearly vote to overturn Obergefell as soon as they get the chance to do so. The three liberals on the court definitely would not. What would the remaining four do? It's anybody's guess," said Silverstein of the current Supreme Court judges.
"It likely won't happen soon. But there are already states passing statutes and possibly some litigation that's begun to try to overturn Obergefell just the way they did Roe [v. Wade]. So there's tremendous legal uncertainty. And the answer is, we just don't know," he said.
So in the meantime, Pride Month marches on.
It's clear that the fight — or the riot — for equality is far from over.
"It is so much fun to celebrate with each other and wear our rainbows and be proud," Capek added. "But with the amount of people who are living fearfully, specifically Black and brown, trans individuals walking down the street fearing for their life every single day, we still have so far to go, and that's what a reminder of what Pride is."