A few judges are still refusing to see gay and lesbian couples in Alabama. Texas has had its first lesbian marriage, and now state officials are scrambling to find a way to undo it. And some major national anti-gay figures are preparing to release a new manifesto to stop the freedom to marry.
Almost every county in Alabama is issuing marriage licenses now, but incredibly, a handful judges are still defying the federal ruling. Depending on who you ask, as of last week, there were about fifty counties finally complying with the order to let gays and lesbians marry. That leaves around seventeen where you still can't get a license.
A few have stopped marriages altogether, but most of the remaining counties are only turning away gays and lesbians. Judge Nick Williams in Washington County said "I'm not worried about following the U.S. Constitution," which he probably should have mentioned before being sworn in as a judge.
Meanwhile, Judge Roy Moore, the Supreme Court Justice who started all this trouble, may be in some trouble of his own now. Moore told state judges that he wouldn't allow them to issue licenses, but he really can't do that. The Human Rights Campaign has gathered nearly 30,000 signatures calling for an investigation into whether Moore should be removed from office.
Moore's been down this road before. In 2003 the Court of the Judiciary kicked him out of office for making up his own rules about a Ten Commandments statue. But even if he's removed for a second time, we might not have heard the last of him. Ordinarily, Moore couldn't run for office again because he's about to pass an age limit. But a Republican Senator has introduced a new bill to raise the limit, so Moore could run for re-election again in 2018.
There is one married lesbian couple in Texas right now. Probably. Last week a judge allowed Sarah Goodfriend and Suzanne Bryant to obtain a marriage license, citing urgency after Sarah was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The ruling applies only to this one couple. And according to state officials, that's still one couple too many.
Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton all want to take the license away from the cancer-stricken couple of 31 years who are raising two children. Paxton has declared that the is license void, and the couple is not actually married. But can he actually do that? That's murky. He can try. Attorneys General have a lot of legal authority, but it's kind of unheard of to step in and un-marry a couple, particularly after a judge ordered them married.
The common thread between Roy Moore's actions and Texas' is that they're pretty desperate. People who oppose marriage equality are running out of options, which is why you're seeing last-ditch attempts to do something, anything. And they might delay marriage for a bit, or force you to take a bus to the next county, or issue threats to a family facing a terminal illness. But at this point they know they're not going to win.
And yet still they're trying. Last week, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp introduced a federal constitutional marriage ban in Congress. They tried this over a decade ago and it went nowhere. It's going to go less than nowhere this time.
But according to reports, there's a group of national anti-gay leaders working on a new proclamation to stop marriage equality. The title is "Reclaiming Marriage," and they'll probably release it in March. The people who have seen a copy have called it a sweeping manifesto, signed by the very people you'd expect. But even this sweeping manifesto will probably be pretty weak. The only call to action is "careful discernment" over the coming years. And even that is expecting a lot of these people.