Marriage News Watch, 7/6/15

With the job done and victory won, Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights makes his final report on same-sex marriage:




And in Texas, the Hood County couple shown in the clip below (they have been together for 27 years; one has a doctorate in nursing, the other has a master's degree in education) who were denied a marriage license and thrown out of the office by the God-fearing, Bible-believing county clerk last week were issued a license this morning, just hours after they and their attorney filed suit against her in federal district court.  She now says her office will issue marriage licenses to all couples.



Update: I misread.  Apparently County Clerk Katie Lang made a one-time exception to her Bible-based stand in order to evade being sued. The attorney for Jim Cato and Joe Stapleton says that while the couple are delighted that they have been issued a license in their home county, "the lawsuit will not be dismissed until and unless we have an agreement from Clerk Lang that her office will issue marriage licenses to all couples, gay and straight, without delay, and an agreement to pay Jim and Joe’s attorneys’ fees for being forced to file the lawsuit."

Hood County is just a short drive west of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and the county seat of Granbury is a pleasant place to spend a day browsing through the shops and cafes around the lovely old courthouse square. My late husband Cody and I used to enjoy visiting there; here's a couple of snaps he took of me there in years gone by - sadly, there are no pics of us together in Granbury, as there were no selfie sticks in those days:

March 2003.

July 2004.

I'm not sure if there are any other counties in Texas still not issuing licenses; if I find out, I will post more here later today.


Flashback:  How did I miss this outburst?  Must have overslept that day back in April.  From the New Yorker:

There was a shocking, ugly moment during the argument of Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage case, in the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Right after Mary Bonauto, the lawyer challenging marriage bans in several states, completed her argument, a spectator rose from a back row and started screaming, “If you support gay marriage, you will burn in Hell!” As the man yelled, “It’s an abomination!,” guards carried him from the courtroom.

That wasn’t the ugly part, though. In the quiet moment after the man was removed, as his shouts vanished into the hallway, Justice Antonin Scalia filled the silence with a quip. “It was rather refreshing, actually,” he said.

It may have been just a joke from the senior Associate Justice on the Court, but what kind of joke—or was it really a joke at all? Scalia probably did think that the directness of the protester was bracing—“refreshing.” Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that Scalia more or less shared the protester’s view of the immorality of homosexuality, and that he regards the Court’s toleration of gay people as one of the great disasters of his nearly three decades as a Justice.

Scalia’s counter-outburst was a notable contrast to the respectful tone of the rest of the argument, including from his fellow-conservatives. It is one measure of the success of the gay-rights movement that all the other Justices felt compelled to phrase their questions in ways that honored the humanity of gay people.

The humanity of gay people . . . why is this so hard to understand?