President-elect Trump told Lesley Stahl that the issue of same-sex marriage “was settled in the Supreme Court.” Rod Dreher interprets that to mean that “with President Trump, the biggest gay rights gain in history — the constitutional right to same-sex marriage — is safe.” Dreher, although an opponent of same-sex marriage, thinks it makes sense for Trump to focus on protecting religious liberty for dissenters from same-sex marriage rather than trying to change its constitutional status.

In 2015, Trump had said that same-sex marriage was a “dead issue”; at the beginning of this year, he told Chris Wallace that he might look for Supreme Court justices who would undo the same-sex-marriage decision.

A few thoughts:

1) Earlier in the same interview, Trump says his nominees will be pro-life and will vote to send abortion back to the states. I’m sure there are potential justices who would vote to overturn Roe but not Obergefell (the same-sex-marriage decision), but short of specifically asking them to make pledges on both issues I’m not sure how an administration would find them. If you’re looking for a justice with a judicial philosophy that would make them inclined to overturn Roe, nine times out of ten they’d be anti-Obergefell as well.

2) If Obergefell is settled, why isn’t Roe?

3) Maybe Roe would be more likely to fall than Obergefell for other reasons: There’s a stronger elite consensus behind the latter; it might be easier to generate a case that gives the justices an opportunity to revisit the former. But if the two decisions have different ultimate fates, it is probably not going to be because the Trump administration is looking for that outcome.

4) When Evan McMullin gave a similar answer on same-sex marriage, I suggested that he would have been better off saying something like, “I think the Court got it badly wrong in the marriage case, but the Court’s precedents deserve some respect. I will be looking for justices who apply the Constitution faithfully. I will not be asking prospective justices to commit to deciding particular cases in the ways I would like.” That still seems like a better answer to this sort of question. What Trump said invites all kinds of follow-ups about specific policy outcomes he is or is not seeking. And, again, it is not at all clear that the administration would really approach judicial selection that way; other Republican administrations have not.