Same-sex couples have started marrying in some of the most conservative US states, many of which had hoped to fight to maintain their bans on gay marriage in the supreme court. Such hopes ended on Monday, when the high court declined to hear appeals on the subject.
The total number of states allowing gay marriage is expected to climb to 35, the latest being North Carolina, where couples began marrying on Friday evening.
Couples in Nevada, Idaho and Utah began marrying this week; same-sex marriage is expected to begin soon in Alaska, Arizona, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina and Wyoming. The attorney general of West Virginia said on Thursday he would stop fighting for the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Many of the appeals court rulings the supreme court declined to hear came from circuit courts, appeals courts that split the country by regional districts. That is why the supreme court’s decision cleared the way for gay couples to marry in so many states at once.
Some advocates, however, called the victory bittersweet, and said they would prefer the high court to step in and actively end bans across the country.
“We’re kind of torn, in a way, in that we would have liked to see them take up the matter as a whole,” Kim Franklin told the Guardian. She, with her partner Tammy Boyd, is a plaintiff in a federal court case in the fourth circuit, the court that hears appeals from Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky.
“But we’re still excited and of course happy for what it meant for some people, not necessarily us – at least at this point – but at least hundreds of thousands of other couples.”
Couples in North Carolina began marrying on Friday, after a federal court judge in Asheville said the ban should be struck as a “matter of law”.
“The court determines that North Carolina’s laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are unconstitutional as a matter of law,” wrote US district court judge Max O Cogburn Jr, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama. “The issue before this court is neither a political issue nor a moral issue. It is a legal issue.”
Separately on Friday, a short stay put in place in Idaho was lifted.
“We now have more states that have ended the exclusion of gay couples from marriage than had ended bans on interracial marriage when the supreme court brought the country to national resolution in Loving vs Virginia,” said Freedom to Marry president Evan Wolfson, referring to a landmark case that ended anti-interracial marriage laws in the US.
“We hope that the other federal appellate courts will move swiftly to end the disparity and unfair denial that too many loving and committed couples in the 15 remaining states endure.”
