On 13 December 2022, United States President Joe Biden signed into law the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act”. The act purports to “codify” the holding of the 2014 United States Supreme Court case of Obergefell v Hodges, which invalidated laws in any of the 50 states that limited marriage to a union of one man with one woman. Obergefell, of course, did not respect marriage. Rather, the decision rejected marriage as it has been practised for millennia in western societies and replaced it with a morally and politically charged fiction. It is not surprising, then, that the Respect for Marriage Act is itself a piece of fiction, both in why it was passed and what it purports to do.