Saturday is the 11-year wedding anniversary for more than 300 gay and lesbian couples who were married in Michigan following a landmark court decision.
The evening before, in 2014, a federal judge in Detroit ruled Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban violated equal protection and due process rights in the U.S. Constitution. U.S. District Court Judge Bernard Friedman’s decision went into effect immediately, which sent hundreds of couples dashing to clergy and courthouses to get married while they could.
The first documented wedding took place at 8:05 a.m. at the Ingham County Courthouse in Mason.
“By the authority invested in me by the great state of Michigan, I pronounce you married,” declared a teary-eyed Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum to newlyweds Glenna DeJong and Marsha Caspar.
Byrum was one of four county clerks who opened their doors that Saturday to issue licenses and perform same-sex weddings. Clergy also showed up at courthouses to officiate ceremonies and some newlyweds spent their wedding day acting as witnesses for other same-sex couples.
The weddings continued as then-Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican who’d made opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his political career, went immediately to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, seeking a stay. The appeals court granted the request later that day.
That then presented a question on the status of the already-officiated marriages and rights that go along with being married.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the federal government would recognize those first same-sex marriages, while then-Michigan Governor Rick Snyder tried to thread the needle, saying the marriages were legal but nevertheless not recognized by the state.
“It does create more complexity in the matter,” said Snyder, but said he arrived at the conclusion that while the marriages were legal, “there was no other option other than to say we have to suspend the benefits.”
That led to a second case against the state to have those marriages fully recognized by the state.
“The couples married on March 22 are caught in a paradox,” said Caspar. “We’re married and we’re not.”
A little more than a year later, in the summer of 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court settled the matter when it held in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage is legal across the land.
It was a dramatic reversal in the status of marriage rights in Michigan, where voters in 2004 adopted an amendment to the state constitution that held only marriages between a man and a woman would be recognized.
Two decades later, attitudes about same-sex marriage have shifted, said pollster Richard Czuba of the Glengariff Group.
“The country was being told that if you allow same-sex marriage, marriage will collapse in this country,” he told Michigan Public Radio. “Ten years on, I don’t think anyone can credibly make the case that that has happened as a result of same-sex marriage.”
But just weeks ago, state Representative Josh Schriver (R-Oxford) and a handful of other GOP lawmakers sponsored a non-binding resolution calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell.
“This decision has defaced the definition of marriage, undermined our God-given rights, increased persecution of Christians and confused the American family structure,” said Schriver.
The House Republican leadership dismissed the resolution as an unwelcome distraction and assigned it to a graveyard committee to languish.
But LGBTQ rights activists say they are nevertheless concerned because the dormant language of the same-sex marriage ban remains in the Michigan Constitution as well as in statute.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who was one of the lawyers to challenge the same-sex marriage ban, said she would like to see it formally repealed by voters.
“I think it has to be and the reason I say that is because I think the Obergefell decision is in real jeopardy,” said Nessel.
She said resolutions like Schriver’s are being sponsored in legislatures across the country and are designed to invite new legal challenges to same-sex marriage rights.
“We know a resolution can’t overturn a Supreme Court decision,” said Nessel, “but there can be other cases that are litigated that wind up later being argued before the United States Supreme Court, and I really believe they have a majority on that court that would overturn that decision.”
Nessel said a Supreme Court majority displayed a willingness in 2022 to topple what appears to be settled law when it reversed long-standing abortion rights protections. She noted the Obergefell decision was decided by a slim 5-to-4 majority.
