US supreme court rulings are “not just an opinion poll” of its nine judges’ beliefs, conservative Amy Coney Barrett says, as she and her colleagues weigh a request to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage.
“The court should not be imposing its own values on the American people,” Barrett remarked in a preview of an interview airing on the latest episode of CBS News Sunday Morning. “That’s for the democratic process.”
Barrett delivered her comments in what was billed as her first television interview since she joined the supreme court in 2020 – a conversation with the Sunday Morning host Norah O’Donnell meant to promote her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.
In the book, set for publication on 9 September, Barrett asserted her belief that the June 2022 ruling that struck down abortion rights nationally “respected the choice” of Americans. She wrote that she believed the 7-2 Roe v Wade ruling that established those federal abortion rights had “usurped the will of the American people”, as put by CNN, which ran an excerpt of the book a week before its release date.
Yet more than 60% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a May 2024 poll found. That was only four points higher than in 2021, a year before Barrett joined four other ultraconservatives in removing national abortion access protections, clearing the way for numerous states to quickly ban or severely restrict the procedure.
Meanwhile, a May 2025 Gallup poll found 68% support for legal same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, Barrett and her colleagues have been asked to overturn the 2015 Obergefell v Hodges supreme court ruling that recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.
The former Kentucky county court clerk Kim Davis, who stopped issuing marriage licenses in the aftermath of the Obergefell decision, made the request.
In a recent interview with the Raging Moderates political podcast co-host Jessica Tarlov the former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton predicted the supreme court “will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion”.
“They will send it back to the states,” Clinton, who Donald Trump defeated in 2016 to win the first of his two presidencies, said to Tarlov.
When O’Donnell mentioned Clinton’s prediction to Barrett, the justice replied: “People who criticize the court or who are outside say a lot of different things.
“The point that I make in the book is that we have to tune those things out.”
Barrett’s nomination and confirmation were rushed through the US Senate by the Republican majority leader at the time, Mitch McConnell, within weeks of the death of the veteran liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
It gave Trump his third supreme court pick along with a 6-3 conservative supermajority that has consistently ruled in his favor for his second presidency, which began in January, including landmark decisions expanding Oval Office powers.
Barrett’s confirmation was just eight days before the November 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden. It contrasted sharply with McConnell’s handling of the aftermath of the death of another justice, the conservative Antonin Scalia, in February 2016. McConnell back then touted his successful stalling of Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for almost a year, until Trump took office for his first presidency and replaced Scalia with Neil Gorsuch in April 2017.
CNN reported that references to Trump in Barrett’s book – for which she is said to have been paid a $2m advance – were “only in passing”.
O’Donnell pointed out to Barrett that in her book the justice wrote that “the rights to marry, engage in sexual intimacy, use birth control and raise children are fundamental, but the rights to do business, commit suicide and obtain abortion are not”.
“I want Americans to understand the law – and that it’s not just an opinion poll about whether the supreme court thinks something is good or … bad,” Barrett said. “What the court is trying to do is see what the American people have decided.”
