After U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman declared Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional last month, same-sex couples flocked to courthouses statewide to get married, only to see their marriage benefits halted by a temporary stay requested by Attorney General Bill Schuette .
The ACLU is aiming to have the marriages already performed officially recognized by the state.
“These couples were so overjoyed, and then shortly after they felt like they got slapped in the face,” ACLU attorney Jay Kaplan said. “When you hear from real people, you start to understand that what the governor did can be so harmful to people.”
After the initial ruling and the subsequent stay halting marriages until a higher court has time to consider the issue, Gov. Rick Snyder declared the marriages were legal, but said the state would not issue benefits to the couples until court proceedings were finished.
However, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared the marriages legal on the federal level.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment on the law suit Monday.
Plaintiffs in the case include Glenna DeLong and Marsha Cooper , the first same-sex couple to be legally married in Michigan. DeLong and Cooper were at a press conference in Lansing in late March held by ACLU and politicians from across the Lansing area to protest Schuette’s stay in the case.
“We didn’t plan, try or even think about being the first same-sex couple to officially marry in Michigan,” DeLong said at the press conference. “I’m just old and I got up early.”
DeLong said she has waited long enough to be with the person she loves.
“I truly don’t understand people’s rabid resistance to treating people equally and with respect. I do know we will be on the right side of history whether it is today, tomorrow or next week,” she said. “After 27 years, I’m done waiting.”
Kaplan said the suit aimed to have plaintiffs from all kinds of different backgrounds.
“We tried to bring a cross section and illustrate various harms done to different families,” he said. “There is a lot of diversity in our LGBT community and we’re trying to illustrate that.”
A precedent was set earlier in the year by Holder, when he encouraged his state-level counterparts to decide for themselves if they would enforce court rulings overturning same-sex marriage bans. Kaplan said Snyder and Schuette had a choice and made the wrong one.
“The governor had a choice — there are other governors in other states that have decided not to fight these court rulings,” he said. “The same option was available to our governor, and he decided not to use it.”
