Alabama has effectively become the thirty-seventh U.S. state to allow gay marriage due to a Supreme Court ruling.“It’s a great day in Alabama for everyone who cherishes freedom,” said Richard Cohen, President of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In January, a district court judge in Alabama helped remove the state’s gay marriage ban. The Supreme Court intends to expand marriage rights to gay couples across the country in future years. Alabama hoped to block the ruling to remove the gay marriage ban until the Supreme Court’s decision on the larger gay marriage case.
Despite Alabama’s efforts to block the removal of the state’s gay marriage ban, the Supreme Court refused Alabama’s request to stop the marriages. Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore instructed the state’s probate judges not to issue same-sex marriage licenses on Sunday, Feb. 8. He insisted that the federal courts had overstepped their bounds, and had no power to order state probate judges to do anything.
“A lot of states in this union have caved to such unlawful authority, and this is not one,” said Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. “This is Alabama. We don’t give up the recognition that law has bounds.”
“Once you start redefining marriage, that’s the ultimate power,’ he added. ‘Would it overturn the laws of incest? Bigamy? Polygamy? How far do they go?”
Some Alabama counties are following the Moore’s order and have stopped conducting weddings altogether.
Moore is infamous for installing a Ten Commandments monument in 2001. In 2003, he was removed from office in lieu of the issue but returned by voters in 2012.
“Judge Moore has [also] been one of the state’s most outspoken critics of gay marriage. He called homosexuality an ‘inherent evil’ in a 2002 custody ruling against a lesbian mother,” says the BBC.
According to NBC, “Gov. Robert Bentley said in a statement that he, too, disagreed with the federal court ruling, by Granade in Mobile. But the governor said he would take no action against probate judges who issued licenses to gay couples.” However, despite some setbacks by the confusion sparked by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, “The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to definitively answer, probably in late June, whether the Constitution allows states to ban same-sex marriage.”
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/09/politics/alabama-supreme-court-gay-marriage/
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31376340
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-declines-block-gay-marriage-alabama-n302786
