WASHINGTON − Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in recent remarks, offered no encouragement to anyone hoping he will push the court to overturn its 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide.

Alito, one of the court’s most conservative justices, squarely criticized the decision in an Oct. 3 speech at an academic conference. But he quickly added a disclaimer.

“I am not suggesting that the decision in that case should be overruled,” he said at the event organized by the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. “I have to state that so that what I say today is not misunderstood.”

Alito, who authored the court’s 2022 opinion eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, also noted what he’d said in that ruling.

In response to the concern that overturning Roe v. Wade imperiled other past decisions, Alito wrote that the opinion was not intended to cast doubt on the gay marriage ruling.

Obergefell v. Hodges, Alito said at the conference, “is a precedent of the court that is entitled to the respect afforded by the doctrine of stare decisis.”

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But a former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses in 2015 because of her religious beliefs has asked the court to scrap the decision.

“The High Court now has the opportunity to finally overturn this egregious opinion from 2015,” Mat Staver, head of the conservative legal group representing the clerk, said when filing the appeal in July.

More: Alito says he was right to fear that opponents of gay marriage would be treated as bigots

Court watchers think it’s unlikely the justices will hear her case despite criticisms of it from the conservative side of the bench.

Alito brought up the Obergefell decision as an example of how justices should not be “too quick to read certain constitutional provisions to embody broad abstract principles and to justify results that would have astonished those who framed and ratified those provisions.”

But in laying out what he views as the best way to apply the conservative judicial philosophy of originalism – the idea of interpreting the words of the Constitution as the framers would have understood them – Alito also said it’s OK to go beyond what’s in “black and white.”

More: Kim Davis refused same-sex marriage license in 2015. Now she wants to cancel gay marriage.

In 2024, critics on both the left and the right said the conservative majority’s decision that presidents have immunity for certain official acts lacked any basis in the Constitution.

Alito, however, said that while an originalist judge must start with the text of the Constitution, there are times – such as in the immunity decision – when an originalist principle “emerges from the very structure of the Constitution.” “The absence of explicit constitutional text,” he said, “is not decisive.”