The US Supreme Court has decided not to revisit its ruling a decade ago legalising same-sex marriage.
The justices turned down an appeal from Kim Davis, who was ordered by a lower court to pay compensation to a same-sex couple after refusing to grant them a marriage licence.
Ms Davis argued that same-sex marriage conflicted with her beliefs as an Apostolic Christian.
The 2015 ruling in the case of Obergefell v Hodges was a historic victory for LGBT rights in the US, but some conservatives argue it dealt a blow to religious liberty.
Davis appealed in a civil rights lawsuit by David Ermold and David Moore, a couple who accused her of violating their constitutional right to marry.
“For me, this would be an act of disobedience to God,” she said at the time.
In 2022, federal Judge David Bunning rejected Davis’s argument that her constitutionally guaranteed religious beliefs protected her from liability in the case.
“Davis cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official,” Bunning wrote.
The Rowan County clerk was ultimately ordered to pay $360,000 (£274,000) in damages and served six days in jail for contempt of court.
The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in Cincinnati, Ohio, also ruled against her.
In her appeal to the Supreme Court, Davis’s legal team argued the same-sex marriage right was grounded in a “legal fiction”.
On Monday, Davis’s lawyer, Mat Staver, of the conservative legal group Liberty Counsel, said his client “now faces crippling monetary damages based on nothing more than purported hurt feelings”, reports the Lexington Herald Leader newspaper.
The Trump administration had not commented on her case while it waited to see whether the nation’s top legal arbiter would take up the appeal.
Some conservatives had hoped the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, would revisit the issue of same-sex marriage after the justices in 2023 overturned a longstanding right to abortion.
In Obergefell v Hodges, Anthony Kennedy, a since-retired conservative justice, sided with four liberal justices.
Kennedy wrote in the decision 10 years ago that gay people hoping to marry were “not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions”.
“They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Three of the four conservative justices who dissented in that case still serve on the court.
One of them, Chief Justice John Roberts, wrote in his dissent at the time: “Today, five lawyers have ordered every state to change their definition of marriage. Just who do we think we are?”
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