## Facts

- Houston voters adopted a charter amendment limiting the City’s ability to provide benefits to unmarried domestic partners; Texas later adopted statutory and constitutional provisions limiting recognition of same-sex marriage.
- After federal developments regarding marriage recognition, Houston’s mayor directed that same-sex spouses of City employees who were legally married elsewhere receive the same employment benefits provided to opposite-sex spouses.
- Houston taxpayers sued the mayor and the City, alleging the directive and related public expenditures violated state and local marriage-related provisions, and sought declaratory and injunctive relief.
- The trial court denied the City’s jurisdictional challenges and issued a temporary injunction barring the City from providing benefits to same-sex spouses during the case.
- During the interlocutory appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court decided *Obergefell v. Hodges*; the court of appeals reversed the temporary injunction, treating equal spousal benefits as compelled by *Obergefell*, and remanded.
- The taxpayers sought review in the Texas Supreme Court, arguing the court of appeals misread *Obergefell* and improperly reached merits conclusions at the temporary-injunction stage.

## Issues

1. Whether the court of appeals erred by treating *Obergefell* as conclusively requiring the City to provide the same employment benefits to same-sex spouses as to opposite-sex spouses.
2. Whether, given the interlocutory posture and the effect of *Obergefell* (and later *Pavan v. Smith*), the temporary injunction proceedings were resolved under an improper merits-based analysis.

## Decision

- The Texas Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals’ judgment.
- The Court vacated the trial court’s temporary orders, including the temporary injunction.
- The Court remanded to the trial court for further proceedings to consider and apply *Obergefell* and *Pavan* in the first instance.
- The Court expressly declined to decide whether federal constitutional law ultimately requires Houston to provide equal benefits to employees’ same-sex spouses.

## Legal Principles

- Review of a temporary injunction is limited; a temporary injunction preserves the status quo and does not finally determine the merits.
- *Obergefell* requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriages on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex marriages, but does not by itself resolve every dispute over specific publicly funded benefits without analysis of the particular law and policy.
- *Pavan* confirms that states may not confer rights and responsibilities on married opposite-sex couples that are withheld from married same-sex couples, but application to particular benefit schemes may require case-specific adjudication.
- Appellate courts exceed proper interlocutory review when they conclusively resolve disputed merits questions that should be developed and decided in the trial court.

## Conclusion

The Texas Supreme Court set aside the appellate and temporary-injunction rulings that treated federal marriage-equality decisions as automatically dispositive of Houston’s spousal-benefits policy, and returned the case to the trial court to determine—on a developed record—how *Obergefell* and *Pavan* apply to the challenged expenditures and legal provisions.


Pidgeon v. Turner, 538 S.W.3d 73 (Tex. 2017)