The left waged lawfare to force Christians who hold the traditional view of marriage to keep their heads down.
Bakers, coaches, and foster care agencies all landed in court for living out their faith.
And Justice Samuel Alito finally put his own verdict in print. The Left isn’t going to like a single word of it.
The Speeches Nobody Heard the First Time
Alito has a new book out. Basic Liberty released So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country in October 2026, according to its publisher’s listing at Hachette Book Group.
The book gathers 19 of Alito’s speeches, ABC News reported. Seven of them went to Catholic audiences.
Several of those talks never reached the general public when he gave them. One of them, a 2018 address at Catholic University of America three years after the Court handed down Obergefell v Hodges, took place away from public view, and the press barely covered it.
That’s the speech making the media sweat.
“The Decisive Point”
In that 2018 address, Alito called the 2015 same-sex marriage ruling “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty.”
He didn’t pull that idea out of thin air. Alito dissented in Obergefell, a case the Court decided by a single vote, 5-4.
“In dissent from that ruling, I expressed my worry that equating the expression of certain views with bigotry — or, if you like, with dignitary harm — would drive believers out of public life,” Alito said in the 2018 speech.
Read that slowly. He warned that once the government and the culture started treating a centuries-old Christian teaching on marriage as hate, ordinary believers would start vanishing from public life.
But Alito saw it coming. Then he watched it happen.
“Quite suddenly, religious liberty has become controversial,” Alito told the Magnificat Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to Catholic culture and tradition, in a 2022 speech the book makes public for the first time.
And he didn’t stop there. “What we see in these and other cases,” Alito said in that same speech, “is a refusal to live in peace with those who violate the new moral code.”
The new moral code. Not the one the country inherited from its Christian heritage. The one activists wrote, enforced, and now expect everybody else to sign.
A Docket Full of Believers Dragged Into Court
Alito didn’t just theorize. He pointed to the lawsuits.
A Colorado baker got sued for refusing to create a wedding cake for a gay couple. A Christian website designer had to fight for the right not to build sites celebrating same-sex ceremonies. Philadelphia moved to exclude Catholic Social Services from its foster care program, citing LGBT discrimination.
A public school football coach faced discipline for praying at midfield after games. Religious employers had to battle the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. And states passed laws banning conversion therapy that some religious advocates said amounted to a gag order on Christian teaching about human sexuality.
The believers won nearly every one of those fights at the Supreme Court, ABC News noted. Alito joined the majority in all of them.
But think about what it took to get there. Years of legal bills. Years of getting called a bigot in the local paper. Years of wondering whether the bakery, the job, or the ministry would survive.
“It says a lot that the parties whose free-exercise rights were violated had to take their claims all the way to our Court,” Alito said at a 2021 event.
That’s the whole ballgame right there. A right you have to sue your way to the highest court in the land to exercise is a right under siege.
The Catholics in the Cellars
The most striking passage comes from a 2021 speech at Thomas Aquinas College.
Alito compared Americans who believe marriage unites one man and one woman to Catholics pushed to the margins in England after the Reformation. He quoted a historical description of those Catholics as “a people who shunned the light of day,” people “found in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses of the country.”
“What I predicted in my dissent is coming to pass,” Alito said.
Some will call that dramatic. But ask the Colorado baker how dramatic those years in court felt. Ask the coach who got disciplined over a prayer.
Not Every Ally Reads It the Same Way
To be fair, some of the biggest religious liberty legal shops sound a lot more upbeat.
First Liberty Institute’s Jeff Mateer wrote in the group’s 2025 annual report, “We continue to win unparalleled court victories at every level of the judiciary furthering the religious liberty of all Americans, resulting in more religious freedom today than at any other time in our lives.”
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s 2025 report declared that “faith in the public square is on the rise.”
Those groups fought hard for those wins, and they deserve the credit. But the wins happened in courtrooms. Alito’s warning concerns the culture outside them, where plenty of Christians still bite their tongues at the office before saying what the Bible teaches about marriage.
Maybe both things are true at once. The courtroom scoreboard looks good. The pressure at the water cooler hasn’t let up.
What Alito’s Warning Really Means
Alito has said he isn’t calling for the Court to overturn Obergefell. In 2025, he said publicly that while he strongly opposes the ruling, he is “not suggesting that the decision should be overruled,” according to ABC News.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s most fearless originalist, has gone further and openly urged his colleagues to revisit the decision.
And the activist crowd has noticed. Many LGBTQ advocates now fear Obergefell may not rest on settled ground, ABC News reported, partly because of Alito’s public criticism.
But notice where the coverage keeps landing. Reporters fixate on whether the ruling survives. Alito keeps asking about the people the ruling left behind: the Christians told their beliefs now count as bigotry.
He expects the fight to keep coming. Alito said the dynamic will “virtually guarantee that the Supreme Court will continue to see a steady stream of religious-liberty cases.”
The next round will probably look familiar. Government schools, workplace speech codes, professional licensing boards. Same playbook, new targets.
The promotional materials for the book include a blurb from Mollie Hemingway calling Alito “a man of faith who loves his family, his country, and, for good measure, the Phillies.” Fair enough on the Phillies.
Alito calls freedom of religion his “pet issue.” After 20 years on the high court and a book full of warnings that keep coming true, the country could use a few more justices with the same pet.
Sources:
“Alito calls same-sex marriage a ‘decisive’ turn ‘against religious liberty’ in new book,” ABC News
“So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country,” Hachette Book Group