Don’t fool yourself into thinking same-sex marriage is safe, Imani Gandy warns in her latest op-ed for Rewire News Group. The Supreme Court could eliminate marriage equality as abruptly as it ended abortion rights—and, given the chance, it probably will.

It may soon get that chance. Last week, a conservative Christian activist filed a petition officially asking the Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage. The plaintiff is Kim Davis, the Kentucky court clerk who once refused to give a marriage license to a gay couple, citing “religious freedom,” and rode that freedom all the way to jail.

Gandy, our co-chief content officer, is a legal oracle: She called the end of Roe v. Wade well before the Court overturned it in 2022. “People said I was being dramatic,” Gandy writes. “That I should stop fearmongering.”

But, of course, she was right.

So when Gandy declares that “same-sex marriage is absolutely on the chopping block,” the threat is real. Click here to find out why marriage equality rests on shaky legal footing.

Anti-democratic actions

• Texas Democrats announced this morning that they returned to the state, ending their two-week standoff with state Republicans over a new, Trump-requested congressional map that would favor the GOP. The bill will now have the required quorum of lawmakers to be voted on in a second special legislative session called by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
• Three Republican-led states will deploy National Guard members to Washington, D.C., the Washington Post reported over the weekend, adding some 500 troops to Trump’s week-long occupation of the nation’s capitol. The administration says it’s protecting public safety, but Department of Justice data shows that violent crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low last year. On Aug. 15, a federal judge restored command of the local police to its police chief, rebuffing Attorney General Pam Bondi’s federalization of the local police, citing the 1973 Home Rule Act. It was the first time a judge has ever had to rule on the law, which gives Washington, D.C. some autonomy.
• Trump on Aug. 18 said that he would sign an executive order moving to eliminate mail-in voting based on his false assertion that mail-in ballots contributed to fraud in the 2020 election, which he lost.
• Trump’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) told Fox News on Aug. 4 that the agency “should suspend” its monthly job reports. E.J. Antoni, an economist at the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, claimed—with little evidence—that the reports have data quality issues. Trump fired the previous head of the BLS earlier this month after its July report showed a weak job market. Economists on both sides of the aisle have questioned Antoni’s understanding of economic concepts and data, according to the New York Times.

Pro-democracy wins

• The National Science Foundation must restore some of the grant funding it suspended from UCLA, a federal judge ruled on Aug. 12. The money was “indefinitely suspended” in July as part of the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on higher education; it targets universities that it says use DEI practices in hiring and admissions and permit anti-semitism to flourish on their campuses. In its lawsuit against UCLA, the Trump administration has asked for an unusually high amount, $1 billion.

Reproductive rights

• Misinformation about Costco briefly had the internet abuzz last week after multiple outlets reported that the retail giant’s pharmacies won’t sell the abortion medication mifepristone following a pressure campaign by anti-abortion groups. The resulting conversation often lacked a key detail, as the Washington Post explained: Costco does not currently sell mifepristone. Its 500 pharmacies are not certified to dispense the drug, and the wholesaler cited “lack of demand” as the reason for not seeking it. Nonetheless, journalist Susan Rinkunas wrote for MSNBC, anti-abortion groups are claiming victory in their push to convince national pharmacy chains, including CVS, to stop selling the drug.
• The Trump administration neglected to reference reproductive rights in its yearly human rights report, issued Aug. 12, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. The administration also appeared to strip unfavorable information about human rights abuses from reports on countries with which the U.S. currently has a favorable relationship, including El Salvador, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. The diminished rights report is similar to those put out during the first Trump White House, according to POLITICO.

LGBTQ+ rights

• The Trump administration’s scant human rights report could also make it harder for LGBTQ+ people to convince immigration officials that they qualify for asylum, both in the U.S. and abroad, according to HuffPost. “The standard for determining whether someone deserves asylum or is a refugee is if they have a well-founded fear of persecution,” one expert told the outlet. “So these reports historically have been critical in documenting the conditions that people are experiencing in their countries.”
• Nearly 300 people incarcerated in Georgia are suing the state, alleging that its May 2025 law blocking gender-affirming care in prisons is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, The 19th reported.
• An Arkansas law barring gender-affirming care for minors can stand, a federal appeals court ruled on Aug. 12. The law bans hormones, hormone blockers, and gender-affirming surgeries for people under 18. The ruling echoed much of the Supreme Court’s June 2025 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which found that a gender-affirming care ban for minors in Tennessee did not amount to sex-based discrimination. The federal appeals court also ruled that parents have no inherent right to access health care for their children that legislatures have deemed inappropriate, citing “history and tradition.”

Immigration

• A former prison in rural Tennessee may soon reopen its doors—to jail immigrants, the Associated Press reported. The Board of Aldermen in Mason, Tennessee (population: 1,300) voted last week to turn the shuttered facility into an ICE detention center run by CoreCivic, a private prison operator frequently sued for financial mismanagement. The news prompted loud boos from upset residents. “I don’t like what ICE stands for, how they treat the people,” said board member Virginia Rivers.
• Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis announced last week that the state will open its second immigration detention center, dubbed “Deportation Depot,” in a state prison near Jacksonville. Construction on Florida’s first ICE facility, located in the Everglades, is currently on pause while a judge considers a lawsuit by environmental groups.
• Paraguay has agreed to hold asylum seekers while they make their cases to the U.S. government. The agreement, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, appears to include sending asylum-seekers already in the U.S. to Paraguay. Advocates told the Associated Press the deal raises concerns about “questionable deportations.”

Health and science

• The gunman who fired more than 180 shots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta on Aug. 8 before taking his own life was motivated by a “distrust” of COVID-19 vaccines, POLITICO reported last week. The news, confirmed by law enforcement officials, refuted claims by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that not enough information was known about the shooter’s motive. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine campaigner who now oversees the CDC, has criticized his own agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• More than 600 research projects seeking to understand racial and socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes in the U.S. were terminated by the National Institutes of Health, a new analysis of federal data by the New York Times has revealed. It’s unclear what will become of all of the projects, some of which are involved in ongoing litigation over the Trump administration’s spending cuts. But “the rollbacks represent a seismic shift for health scientists, and the hobbling of a long campaign to unravel the causes of poor health in minority communities, low-income and rural areas, and among Americans with disabilities,” Times reporters wrote.

Rewire recommends

• The Trump administration “wants more babies,” and it touts the economic policies it put in place to boost the birth rate. But like many of this president’s policies, there’s a catch: The financial benefits don’t apply to parents who get pregnant, carry that pregnancy to term, and give birth—to a stillborn baby. Jill Wieber Lens, a law professor and stillbirth parent, explains why Trump’s “baby bonus” and tax credit, which only apply to live birth, add “insult to injury” and reveal the “hypocrisy of the administration’s so-called ‘pro-life’ policies.”
• This week in Boom! Lawyered Summer Session, Imani and Jess interview Lourdes Rivera, president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, who potently connects attacks on birthright citizenship with anti-abortion fetal “personhood” legal arguments. “If a pregnant person is carrying another ‘person,’ right, then the government can intervene to protect the ‘person’ that you’re carrying,” Lourdes explains. “Which basically means that the pregnant person doesn’t have any more rights.” Catch Boom! Lawyered on Spotify and YouTube.

Unwind

• This week, a delightful video of a young boy and his tiny goat took over the internet. Milo Garza and his goat Teddy Bear came in fourth place at a goat show in Texas. But the 5-year-old couldn’t have been prouder. He was filmed tenderly hugging and kissing brown-and-white Teddy Bear after the competition. Garza’s favorite thing about Teddy Bear is “his legs,” he told NBC’s Tom Llamas, his eyes sparkling. “They’re fat.”