This is why regular people always cringe when public officials draw lines in the sand. They know it is they who will lose in the end.
So when the Alabama Supreme Court indulged its desire to thumb its nose at the federal courts Tuesday and ordered the state’s probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, we knew there would simply be more litigation. And today that’s exactly what we got. A coalition of civil rights group has asked the federal judge who got this party started to issue her own order to those same probate judges, ordering them to resume issuing licenses.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the Southern Poverty Law Center have asked US District Court Judge Callie Granade to extend her original order to all probate judges in Alabama and to clarify that they are to issue marriage licenses to all same-sex couples who apply.
Here’s the write-up about it in the Huffington Post. Something tells me this won’t be the last we hear about this.