A Friday full of marriage licences
Sixty-six couples, one afternoon: how a county clerk in New Mexico anticipated marriage equality in 2004.
On 20 February 2004, the county office of Sandoval County in New Mexico experienced an unusual Friday. County Clerk Victoria Dunlap, a Republican, issued marriage licences to same-sex couples. Her reasoning was sober: no state law prohibited it. Only an old form referred to man and woman, and an equal rights law expressly prohibited discrimination on grounds of sex. It had nothing to do with politics or morality, she said.
The news spread quickly. A good week earlier, San Francisco had begun marrying couples, and now the debate seemed to have reached the rural South-West too. In the afternoon, Attorney General Patricia Madrid intervened. She declared the licences invalid, and Dunlap stopped issuing them. By then, sixty-six couples had their document in hand.
A few days later, President George W. Bush pointed to the events in New Mexico when he called for a nationwide constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. A court barred Dunlap from issuing any more. A conservative organisation demanded that the licences already issued be annulled. That never happened. The legal dispute petered out.
The twist came years later, and it was bittersweet. Two women who had received a licence that Friday went their separate ways. When one filed for divorce, the other argued that the marriage had never been valid. A judge in Santa Fe saw it differently in 2010: the licences were at most voidable, but not void from the outset. The divorce could proceed. So it was in divorce court, of all places, that one of the Sandoval County marriages proved its validity.
New Mexico only opened marriage to all couples in the state at the end of 2013, following a ruling by its Supreme Court.