Despite Marriage Licenses, Gay Couples Face 'Legal Uncertainty'

While five same-sex couples, including a pair of Limerick residents, became the first in Pennsylvania history to be granted marriage licenses on Wednesday morning,  and over a dozen were granted licenses since then, an ACLU attorney who’s fighting the state’s ban on gay marriage cautioned that the new unions could face a long period of legal limbo.

“Any [gay or lesbian couple] who is going to get a marriage license [in Pennsylvania] has to be aware that there is going to be some legal uncertainty for some time. It’s just a question of what any individual couple wants to deal with,” American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania senior staff attorney Mary Catherine Roper said on Wednesday night. 

Just hours before, Montgomery County register of wills Bruce Hanes issued marriage licenses to Wynnewood’s Sasha Esther Ballen and Diana Lynn Spagnuolo as well as four other same-sex couples; defying a state law Roper hopes to invalidate.  

Roper is counsel for the plaintiffs in Whitewood v. Corbett—the ACLU’s federal lawsuit against the state of Pennsylvania on behalf of 21 residents who want the Commonwealth to allow them to marry or recognize their out-of-state marriages. She said the legal issues raised by Wednesday’s events are wholly separate from those in Whitewood, and should have no impact on the suit. 

Although she “expects there will be litigation” regarding the five licenses Hanes issued, Roper said any challenge would likely be limited in scope to the question of whether a county register of wills has the authority to overrule Pennsylvania law.

Roper said she isn’t sufficiently familiar with that area of Pennsylvania law to have an opinion on whether the marriage licenses issued Wednesday—or in the case of Limerick residents Loreen Bloodgood and Alicia A. Terrizz, the marriage itself—would stand up to such a challenge, but suggested the precedent set by other states doesn’t necessarily auger well for the five couples. 

“When we have seen this before in other states it has resulted in court challenges and sometimes in the retroactive annulment of the marriages,“ the attorney said, pointing out that while the California Supreme Court determined same-sex couples have a right to marry, in a previous decision the court ruled that local officials don’t have the authority to bypass state marriage law.

Roper added that while the ACLU of Pennsylvania is committed to bringing the state to trial on gay marriage, in the case of a legal challenge, it is unlikely to get involved in the defense of the five marriage licenses that were issued in Montgomery County.

“The register of wills has his own lawyers,” she said.