Alabama Lawmakers Now Want To Eliminate Marriage Licenses

The political insanity in Alabama continues GOP lunatics who control both houses of the state legislature want to eliminate marriage licenses so that homophobic probate court judges will have no need to issue licenses to same sex couples.  The idiocy is part of the Christofascists' agenda of undermining same sex marriage granted in the Obergefell ruling in 2015.  One can only hope that if the bill is signed into law - a likely event given the idiot who holds the governorship at present - Alabamians will encounter problems when they venture outside of their knuckle dragging state.  Imagine Mobilians having to travel to Pensacola, Florida to make sure they have marriages that will be fully recognized out of state.  Having lived in Alabama years ago, I cannot help but wonder at times how insanity has metastasized in Alabama - but then I realize the cause: the rise of the Christofascists in the Republican Party.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this latest batshit craziness in Alabama:

Conservative [Christofascist] Alabama lawmakers are now taking serious aim at marriage law, wasting no time since passing an extreme measure eliminating nearly all abortions in the state. 

On Friday, the Alabama legislature sent a Republican-backed measure to the desk of Gov. Kay Ivey (R) that would aid officials who oppose same-sex marriage.

Under existing state law, couples are required to obtain a marriage license from a probate judge and hold a ceremony to “solemnize” the union. If Ivey signs the measure introduced by state Sen. Greg Albritton (R), the solemnization requirement would be eliminated and it would become the responsibility of couples themselves to record their own union.

Probate judges would simply be required to pass those records along to a state office and could not reject any marriage for which all paperwork is in order. That means judges who personally oppose same-sex marriages would be able to distance themselves from such unions.

In Alabama, some probate judges stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether after the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling because the judges did not want to be forced to issue licenses to same-sex couples. That has meant that some Alabama couples are required to travel to other counties to obtain a license.

But even as the measure would functionally eliminate barriers to marriage equality, Albritton referenced religious objections to same-sex unions in discussing his bill.  Under it, “a minister who has an objection to a particular marriage ceremony, they don’t have to do it,” he said.

Alabama’s political leadership is notoriously hostile to LGBTQ rights; the state’s public television station recently refused to air an episode of the children’s cartoon “Arthur” featuring a same-sex wedding.

“I think it’s far less about good governance and more about protecting folks that don’t want to do their jobs.”  The bill was propelled through the state House and Senate largely with Republican support, although some Democrats voted for it.

Note that I lined through "conservative" at the outset of the article quote.  It is far past time that these politicians be called out for what they truly are: religious extremists - or the political whores of religious extremists.  There is nothing conservative about being a religious fanatic. 

Resistance to Gay Marriage Follows Path of Old Style Racists

Anti-gay Christofascists take huge offense - at least in public - at rightly being compared to the segregationists of the 1950's and 1960's (and beyond) in the manner in which they (i) use cherry picked Bible passages to justify hate and discrimination against others and (ii) are refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges last month.  Frankly, if you engage in the same type of behavior and use the same tired religious claims to justify bigotry, then the comparison is valid.  A piece at ABC News lays out the continued parallels between Christofascists opposition to interracial marriage and same sex marriage.  Here are highlights:

Legal experts suggest that history might hint at how the coming months will unfold, as a handful of defiant clerks across the South and Midwest refuse to abide by the Supreme Court's ruling last month that legalized gay marriage.

The first test is set to begin Monday in a Kentucky courtroom. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who cited her Christian faith on June 30 as she refused to issue marriage licenses to any couple, gay or straight. Other county clerks rallied around her, demanding the government protect Christians from having to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The aftermath of the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling Loving v. Virginia played out in similar ways, according to Sam Marcosson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Louisville. Now, once again, scattered patches of resistance will force the courts to intervene.

In 1967, Liane Peters and James Van Hook, turned to the NAACP, which sued the county and won. The couple received a license the following year.

They are still married, 47 years later. Van Hook is 82 and his wife is 76. They have two sons and three grandkids, she said. They still live in a little house with a big yard and garden they bought soon after their wedding.

Interracial couples across the South also had to sue, said Peter Wallenstein, a history professor at Virginia Tech who wrote a book called "Tell the Court I Love my Wife" about race and marriage in the United States. The legal battles dragged on for years.

In 1970, three years after the Supreme Court's decision, an Alabama judge denied a marriage license to a white soldier stationed at Fort McClellan and his African-American fiancee, Wallenstein wrote. The federal government sued to force the county to comply.

The question is how long they can stall and make mischief," said Kenneth D. Upton, senior counsel for Lambda Legal, a law office that specializes in LGBT issues.

Some take offense at the comparison between interracial marriages five decades ago and the religious objections to same-sex marriage that clerks are raising today.

Others scoff at the thought of letting elected officials decline to do part of their job. Marcosson compared the situation to the Catholic Church's refusal to marry people who have been through a divorce. The church and its followers have the religious freedom to decline to recognize those marriages. But a Catholic clerk in public office has no right to deny a civil marriage license to someone who has been divorced, he said.

Christofascist Hysteria Over Gay Marriage Continues - Will Alabama Defy SCOTUS?

One can only hope as the Christofascists become more deranged and hysterical in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that more and more thinking Americans will realize that these "godly Christians" truly belong in a mental ward.  Preferably ones with high razor wire fences to keep the crazies locked within.  Over at Renew America, a SPLC registered hate group, on display are the spittle flecked rantings of Madeline Crabb whose bio first and foremost describes her as a "Christian."  Like most of the Christofascist authors, she has no credentials that make her competent to address issues of sexual orientation, gender identity or anything else and stripped of all the attempts at rhetorical flourish, her arguments rested solely on the Bible, a book authored by unknown writers who had a Bronze age knowledge of sexuality and thought the sun revolved around the Earth. 

In her diatribe Crabb attacks the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court as "mere men had nothing to do with creating marriage any more than they created the heavens, earth, or the very air we breathe."  Crabb, as is typical of Christofascists, conveniently ignores the fact that the Bible was authored by mere men - and ignorant uneducated ones at that - who in the case of the Old Testament had an agenda to keep Israelites separate and distinct from surrounding cultures and in the New Testament as ultimately comprised to maintain the power and control of the winning faction of the early Christians.  Here's a sample of her idiocy:

Five arrogant men and women declared themselves little gods, and chose to normalize same-sex partnerships, calling them "marriage," thus legalizing the accompanying activity that God calls an abomination: sodomy. (Actually, there's a plethora of other perverse activities homosexuals also do to "couple" that are simply too vile to speak about.) These judges supposedly "found" within the U.S. Constitution a "civil right" that for 239 years, legislators and much wiser judges were unable to find.

It would be easy to dismiss Crabb's rants as out of the mainstream Christian thought - the ravings of a lunatic if you will - yet in Alabama, two "Christian" groups are tying to convince the Alabama Supreme Court to defy the U.S. Supreme Court and ignore the Obergefell ruling.  SCOTUS blog looks at this craziness.  Here are excerpts (note the reliance on a ruling from 150+ years ago):

Asked by the Alabama Supreme Court for advice on what to do next on same-sex marriage, two conservative advocacy groups in the state have urged both direct and indirect resistance to the Supreme Court’s ruling mandating a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to wed.  The state court, the groups argued, has the constitutional power to refuse even to accept what the Justices have done, and has a constitutional duty to insulate state officials from legal risk if they do not obey the decision based on a religious objection.

The thirty-three-page brief was filed on Monday by the Alabama Policy Institution, . . . .and by the Alabama Citizens Action Program, an inter-denominational church support group, which earlier had persuaded the state’s highest court to block all of the state’s sixty-eight probate judges from issuing any marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even though all of them were under an order to do so by a federal judge in Mobile.  Depending on what the state court now does, it could set up a new federal-state collision that potentially could go to the Supreme Court.  Lower federal courts could take direct action against state trial court judges, but only the Supreme Court could review a decision by the Alabama Supreme Court on a federal constitutional issue.

The two probate judges said in short briefs that the state court had to respect and follow the binding ruling of the Supreme Court — the same position that Alabama’s attorney general has taken.

Aside from reciting at length from the Obergefell dissenters, the brief was focused heavily on the back-and-forth decisions of Wisconsin’s highest state court and the Supreme Court, over the power of a state court to order the release of an abolitionist, Sherman M. Booth, from federal custody on charges related to his role in arranging the freedom of a runway slave from Missouri.  The slave was never recaptured, but the Supreme Court, in the unanimous decision in Ableman v. Booth, ruled that the state court had no power to interfere with the prosecution of Booth. 

The Alabama groups’ brief noted that the state supreme court refused to accept the Supreme Court’s decision: “In the nearly 157 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s purported reversal [of two state court rulings], the Wisconsin Supreme Court has never filed or accepted the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandates.”  What the state court did, the brief asserted, was done “in fidelity to the U.S. Constitution.”

When the federal courts engage in “unlawful acts,” the brief contended, state courts have the obligation to resist, even if that sets up “a collision” between state and federal courts.
The two groups devoted the last three pages of their filing to arguing that the state supreme court should do what needs to be done to insulate all state probate judges, and any members of their staffs from any punishment if they refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of their religious opposition to such unions. 

As I have noted before, Alabama is far crazier now than when I lived there over 30 years ago.  WTF is in the water?

Arkansas Supreme Court Dismisses Appeal of Gay Marriage Ruling, Denies Emergency Stay

Confusion reigns over the state of same sex marriage in Arkansas after the Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed an appeal from the state court ruling striking down that state's anti-gay marriage amendment.  The Supreme Court also denied the State's request for an emergency stay.  While both actions look promising to supporters of marriage equality, the rules in reality do not reveal what the ultimate outcome will be because the Court's actions were focused on legal technicalities - e.g., the lower court order was not yet "final" and therefore not yet subject to appeal - than on any substantive decision.  A piece in the Arkansas Times looks at the developments and why no real result has yet been achieved.  Here are excerpts:

The Arkansas Supreme Court has denied a request for an emergency stay of Judge Chris Piazza's order overturning the ban on same-sex marriage. The court also dismissed as premature an appeal of Piazza's ruling because it wasn't a final order.

Marriage equality remains the law of the land in Arkansas, but the court injected a wrinkle that will give counties cover to continue to refuse marriage licenses to same-sex couples. And that wrinkle has prompted Pulaski Clerk Larry Crane to say that, for the time being, his office likely will cease issuing licenses to same-sex couples.

The court noted that Piazza's ruling didn't mention a statute that prohibits clerks from issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples. It remains in effect. Action will now shift to Piazza's court to pursue final orders, injunctive relief and a cleanup on the omitted statute.

Said Jack Wagoner, attorney for the plaintffs:

We'll fix that tomorrow and be back here again.... How can you  find something unconstitutional but not affect a statute that would require the clerks to do something unconstitutional?

Justices Donald Corbin and Paul Danielson issued a separate concurrence that said they simply would have dismissed the appeal for lack of a final order and rejected the emergency stay request because the case is still before the trial court.

In addressing Attorney General Dustin McDaniel's argument that the court should exercise its superintending authority and issue a stay because of confusion on the part of clerks on whether they should issue same-sex licenses, the court said:

We tum again to the circuit court's order. Here, the circuit court did not issue a ruling with regard to Ark. Code Ann. $ 9-11- 208(b) (Repl. 2009), "License not issued to persons ofthe same sex." Therefore, the circuit court's order has no effect on Ark. Code Ann. S 9-11-208(b) and its prohibition against circuit and county clerks issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Accordingly, we deny the State's petition for an emergency stay of the circuit court's May 9, 2014 order

At a minimum, this reads as clear protection for the 73 counties that have chosen not to issue licenses despite Piazza's order. Pulaski and Washington have continued to do so.

It's not too early for some speculation. Remember that the plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to deny a stay on the usual familiar grounds — that the state isn't likely to prevail on the merits and that irreparable harm would be done to plaintiffs. If the court was inclined to overturn Piazza, wouldn't it have been better to stay the order now and prevent a possible succession of hundreds of more couples to Larry Crane's office for marriage licenses? That's one school of thought. Another school of thought is that the Supreme Court membership is significantly different from the panel that unanimously struck down a statute aimed at discriminating against gay parents. A split on the court is thought likely, particularly given the higher political aspirations of some members in a state where public sentiment, though improving, remains set against same-sex marriage.

The optics of happy people tasting equality — with friends, kids, relative and admirers in tow — is powerful in the courts — real and of public opinion.

The bottom line?  Stay tuned for more developments and more attempts for a stay and an appeal.