Another day, another left-wing meltdown over something that isn’t actually happening.

This time, leftists are enraged over their false perception that the Supreme Court is about to overturn legal gay marriage nationwide.

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It all started when reports broke that a request for Supreme Court review was made, asking the high court to overturn its 2015 decision establishing gay marriage as the law of the land. With this one headline, a viral narrative emerged: The Supreme Court is about to take away gay marriage! Look what President Donald Trump is doing!

There’s just one problem: this all rests on a series of misunderstandings about how the American system of government actually works.

Yes, it’s true that lawyers representing Kim Davis, a former county clerk who infamously refused to issue gay marriage licenses, requested Supreme Court review in a case and did specifically ask the court to reconsider gay marriage. But, unless and until the Supreme Court accepts this case for review, this news isn’t a major development. It certainly doesn’t suggest an impending revocation of gay marriage.

After all, the Supreme Court receives roughly 10,000 requests for case review every year, and only accepts fewer than 100 of them, a review rate of roughly 1%. So, just because this gay marriage request was filed doesn’t mean the court is likely to take up the case. Every commentator, journalist, and politician presenting this news as indicative of looming change is misleading their audience.

Despite the glib social media posts “checking in” on “gays for Trump,” this development doesn’t directly have anything to do with Trump or his reelection in 2024. This exact scenario — Kim Davis’s lawyers filing a request for Supreme Court review — most likely would have played out if former Vice President Kamala Harris had won the presidential election. (If the high court were to take up the case and overturn gay marriage, it would have a lot more to do with Trump’s win in 2016, which allowed him to appoint three current Supreme Court justices, than his 2024 victory.)

Moreover, while I think it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court will grant Davis’s petition for review, even if it did, it still wouldn’t guarantee that gay marriage would be overturned. Considering Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s past writings, Chief Justice John Roberts’s long-standing aversion to overturning precedent, and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s past support for gay rights, there is a very real possibility that this court would uphold gay marriage even were it to review the case.

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Finally, even in the unlikely scenario that the Supreme Court did overturn its gay marriage decision, gay Americans would still have access to same-sex marriage rights in all 50 states thanks to the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act passed under former President Joe Biden.

So, the panic and alarmism over gay marriage isn’t just baseless and scaring Americans needlessly. It’s also a bleak reminder of the civic and media literacy crisis that’s plaguing our political discourse.

Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.