LOVE & STUFF

Nine Couples Sue Colorado Over Same-Sex Marriage Ban

coloradoWell, that didn’t take very long. After lawyers racked up one victory after another for equality in various states, nine couples have now sued the state of Colorado.

As in most other states, it’s a federal lawsuit. Presumably the couples are claiming that Colorado’s marriage ban violates the US Constitution. That’s been a winning strategy in California, Virginia, Utah, and Oklahoma.

Unlike most other states, this particular lawsuit doesn’t have the explicit involvement of a major national LGBT group. Maybe HRC or FtM or NCLR or the ACLU or Lambda Legal is working with the attorneys behind the scenes; but there’s been no mention of them.

For now, the state Attorney General says his office will defend the ban. But that’s what the Attorney General of Nevada said, and just recently she reversed course. And in California, Attorney General Kamala Harris found that there was no defense for Prop 8.

If we were taking bets, we’d wager that the Colorado lawsuit will go well. It’s in the same district as Utah and Oklahoma, which have issued pro-equality rulings lately. But courts have a way of surprising you, so nothing’s written in stone just yet.

Meanwhile, a ballot measure to legalize marriage is working its way toward voters, but the soonest it’ll get a vote is 2016.

Colorado was actually an early testing-ground for marriage equality, way back in the early 70s. A clerk named Clela Rorex issued licenses to five or six couples in Boulder before the state Attorney General ruled that the licenses weren’t valid. It only took forty years for the state to get around to revisiting that decision.

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