$640k Payday For Judge Who Turned Gay Couples Away

A wedding is one of the few things a government office still treats as sacred. So what happens when the official behind the desk refuses to perform one? In Texas, apparently they get paid. Judge Dianne Hensley turned same-sex couples away and handed them a referral list. The state's judicial watchdog reprimanded her for it. She sued, arguing that the reprimand itself punished her faith – and this week a court agreed, ordering the state to pay her $640,000.

What Just Happened In Waco?

First, some context. In Texas, judges and justices of the peace may perform weddings but aren't required to – it's an optional duty. For couples who want something quick, affordable, and secular, the justice of the peace is often the only option available. So when that judge says no, the refusal carries the weight of the state behind it, not just one person's faith.

Hensley, citing her Christian faith, refused to officiate same-sex weddings after the Supreme Court legalized them across the country in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges. She kept marrying opposite-sex couples and pointed same-sex couples to a referral list instead. In 2019 the State Commission on Judicial Conduct issued a public warning to Hensley, indicating that a sitting judge cannot treat one class of couples differently from another.

Religious Liberty, Or A Two-Tier Bench?

Supporters call this a clean win for conscience. Texas keeps a Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the books precisely so government workers aren't forced to choose between their faith and their paycheck. Officiating, her lawyers argued, is a form of speech the state cannot compel. And no couple left empty-handed, and no one ever filed a complaint.

Critics see a public office drawing a private line. A justice of the peace is not a parish pastor; she holds a post funded by the whole county, including the couples turned away at her door. A referral slip, ethics scholars argue, is still a separate, unequal treatment for one kind of couple – a denial with a Post-it attached.

Then there is the bill. The $630,000 went to her lawyers came straight out of the Commission's budget – so the public financed one official's right to decline to marry themselves, or a select group of their neighbors. Fair price for conscience, or a strange use of tax dollars? Depends which side you started on.

And here is what unsettles many people of faith: religious freedom was supposed to run both directions. The ULC ministers who marry same-sex couples with open hearts are exercising their faith, too. When the law shields only the refusal and never the blessing, "religious liberty" starts to seems like a contest to decide whose God gets to win.

Is Gay Marriage Now At Risk Nationwide?

Hensley has appeared on this blog before, when the Texas Supreme Court first let her suit proceed. The pattern is familiar – a Kentucky clerk who refused marriage licenses, a wave of state laws letting businesses decline service to same-sex couples.

Two further elements lurking under the surface could prove monumental:

1. Hensley has also asked federal courts to overturn the 2015 Obergefell ruling outright – the decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide. So a story sold as a simple accommodation carries a much larger aim underneath. Her lawyer in that suit is Jonathan Mitchell, the man who helped topple Roe v. Wade by masterminding Texas's 2021 abortion ban, and his filing asks the courts to hand same-sex marriage back to the states, exactly as the Supreme Court did with abortion.

2. The Waco award may just be the beginning. A statewide class action, Brandt v. State Commission on Judicial Conduct, led by Tarrant County justice of the peace Bill Brandt, seeks tens of millions of dollars in payouts for judges who stopped marrying anyone at all – a number large enough to spook every county in the state away from facilitating weddings. Letting judges refuse to serve is simply safer than asking them to do their job. Across Texas, access to courthouse weddings could disappear by attrition.

But if Texas judges keep stepping back, we are confident that many of the ULC ministers in Texas are ready-and-willing to step up  – anyone who feels called to make sure that no loving couple is denied their right to marry can get ordained and perform these weddings themselves.

So here is the fight worth having: When a faith-based accommodation comes from a public office, does a referral slip preserve equal access – or just outsource the denial? If refusing gay couples becomes the financially safe choice for a county, how many will still say yes? And if religious freedom belongs to everyone, why does it so often guard the refusal and never the blessing?

Tell us where you land.