Legal same sex marriage is coming to Alabama – it's just a question of when

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/30/same-sex-marriage-alabama-question-of-when

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“Honestly, I thought it was a hoax,” Kacie Reeves of Jasper, Alabama said of when she heard that a federal judge ruled that same sex marriages would be allowed in her home state. She and her fiancée, Brittany Rush, had long planned a wedding for friends and family in May – after which they planned to “take a vacation and drive to some other state where we could make it legal.”

But until Reeves “completed two or three Google searches”, she said she thought legal gay Alabama marriage “was some crazy rumor someone had started on Facebook.”

Related: Alabama on potential collision course with supreme court over gay marriage

The brides-to-be still have good reasons to be skeptical about getting legally wed at home. Shortly after the jubilant news, a 14-day stay was put in effect. Then, in a letter to Alabama governor Robert Bentley, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote that nothing “grants the federal government the authority to redefine the institution of marriage” and vowed to “stop judicial tyranny and any unlawful opinions issued without constitutional authority.”

Judge Moore is as wrong about same sex marriage as he was about refusing to remove a 2.6 ton statue of the 10 Commandments from government property (which saw him removed from the bench more than a decade ago): the federal ruling indeed applies to all Alabama officials. But while a ruling in favor of same sex marriage by the Supreme Court this spring could potentially create a right to it in all 50 states, will that stop Alabama’s legal obfuscation and insurrection on marriage equality, given its history?

Consider that the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that interracial couples had a right to marriage. Yet Alabama’s state constitution said interracial marriage was illegal until the year 2000. And when voters cast their ballots about discarding that shameful discrimination against marriage equality from their books, it only passed by 60%.

As to whether they’ll get legally hitched at home as early as next month, Rush said, “if it happens, great. But we’re going to carry on whether it’s legal then or not. We can’t let other people tear us down.”

Tori Sisson, an organizer for HRC Alabama who lives in Tuskegee, is conscious not just of Alabama’s history of being a stumbling block to equality, but also as a vanguard of it. A black woman who majored in history and is engaged to another black woman, Sisson thinks consciously and often about civil rights progress. She recalled how, when she and her fiance took a walk to the park recently, “a lady asked us, ‘Are you a couple?’ And when we were like, ‘Yes, we are a couple,’ and she started giving us a big round of applause, and yelling ‘Do what makes you happy!’”

Like Rush and Reeves, Sisson is well aware of the challenges queer people face in Alabama, and knows that marriage isn’t the last stop on the long march to equality. But she also told me that knows that strangers can surprise you, and that her home turf holds a special place in American civil rights history:

On his way to Selma, Martin Luther King stopped here. Before going to Selma while Martin was in jail there, Malcolm X stopped in Tuskegee. There is something very special about our everyday lived experiences in this place. Even just driving to work, I travel from Tuskegee to Montgomery, where Rosa Parks was born on February 4 in 1913. And we get to know the reasons they made that historic trek, because we are getting to make that trek, too. This is a historic trek.

Sisson and her fiance, Shanté Wolfe, plan to be “the very first in line” when Alabama marriages start happening, perhaps as early as 9 February. “There could be some crazy people,” she says, but “so many people before us have done so much work, we are called to be fearless.”

“We’ll have a lot of work left to do to make sure probate courts are issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples in all counties, and all state agencies are recognizing validly-performed same sex marriage” said Scottie Thomaston of Loxley, Alabama, an Editor for the Courage Campaign Institute’s EqualityOnTrial.com. But that will only be the beginning of the fight for LGBT rights in Alabama, he says: “we don’t have any legal protections on any level. No employment protections.” (This is true in a majority of American states.)

Marriage in Alabama is a good start for LGBT rights in the American Bible Belt, and it’s a particularly powerful advance in the state in which 40% of people voted to deny marriage equality to interracial couples just 15 years ago – and where MLK faced off with Sheriff Jim Clark on the Edmund Pettus Bridge 50 year ago.

But just like after Selma or Stonewall, it’s only a step forward in a fight for equality which may go on for years or decades to come.