For some indiscernible reason, the Washington Post recently saw fit to publish an op-ed by Jim Obergefell, the named plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges, that argues that Senator Rob Portman should be deeply concerned about the nomination of Eric Murphy to a Sixth Circuit seat in Ohio. Obergefell highlights that Murphy, in his capacity as solicitor general of Ohio, defended Ohio’s definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. But Obergefell’s appeal to Portman gets the basics very wrong.

1. Obergefell is “surprised” that Portman, having written an op-ed in 2013 in favor of same-sex marriage, is supporting Murphy’s nomination. Although Obergefell quotes part of Portman’s op-ed, he somehow misses Portman’s statements that “change [to marriage laws] should come about through the democratic process in the states” and that “[j]udicial intervention from Washington would circumvent that process.” In other words, Portman supported same-sex marriage as a matter of policy to be enacted in the states, but his op-ed opposed precisely what the Court’s constitutional ruling in Obergefell later imposed.

2. Obergefell seems deeply confused about the legal question at stake in his case. He contends that Murphy argued that “my marriage was unconstitutional.” Amazingly, the Washington Post headline writer committed the same error (and it’s still up five days later): “He argued that gay marriage was unconstitutional.”

The issue in Obergefell was not whether states were free to change their marriage laws to include same-sex couples. No one disputed that laws allowing “gay marriage” were constitutionally permissible. (As Justice Scalia wrote in his dissent, “The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes.”) The question instead was whether states were constitutionally compelled to allow same-sex marriage.

3. Obergefell faults Murphy for “us[ing] dog-whistles such as ‘traditional marriage’ in his brief to the Supreme Court” and for arguing that “bigotry” did not underlie Ohio’s law. I don’t see how “traditional marriage”—a term that the Sixth Circuit, in the opinion under review, also used—is an objectionable shorthand, and Murphy would have been committing malpractice if he had argued otherwise on the allegations of bigotry.

4. Obergefell wants Murphy to be compelled to “explicitly affirm that my Supreme Court case was correctly decided.” Under settled norms of the confirmation process, no nominee is required to speak to the merits of any recent decision. Further, there is, if you’ll pardon the gross understatement, plenty of reason to believe that Obergefell was not correctly decided. And unless you take the radical position that the four justices who dissented thereby demonstrated their lack of fitness for judicial office, there is no reason to think that Murphy would be unfit for confirmation if he likewise believed the ruling to be wrong (even as he committed to abide by it).