Gay Marriage Becomes Legal In Arizona

Culled from yahoonews

Karen Bailey and Nelda Majors was a couple for 50 years before they told friends and family about their relationship.

They kept it secret to avoid the hostility that they saw lesbians and gay men endure throughout much of their lifetime. Six years after they revealed their relationship, the partners witnessed something that they never thought was possible when they met in the 1950s: gay marriage is now legal.

"We would have never, ever thought we would have had this opportunity," Bailey said hours after she stood among the first same-sex couples in Arizona to get marriage licenses. Continue..

Gay marriage became legal in Arizona on Friday, a sharp turn for a state that became ground zero in the clash over gay rights less than a year ago when the state Legislature passed a bill allowing businesses to deny service to gays and lesbians.

Same-sex couples lined up to marry at the courthouse in downtown Phoenix immediately after Attorney General Tom Horne announced that the state wouldn't challenge a federal court decision that cleared the way for same-sex unions in the state.

The decision bookends two weeks of nonstop court rulings across the nation, 

with judges striking down bans on same-sex unions and conservative state officials, pushing back in a struggle that has increasingly gone in favour of gay marriage supporters.

In the West, for example, couples have since tied the knot in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho and Nevada, making Montana the lone state under the jurisdiction of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals where same-sex couples can't legally wed.

The federal government, meanwhile, announced Friday morning that it will recognize same-sex marriages in seven new states and extend federal benefits to those couples, which brings the total number of states where gay and lesbian unions have federal recognition to 26, plus the District of Columbia.

Based on the flurry of recent court decisions, including separate decisions Friday that apply to Arizona and Alaska, more than 30 states now extend marriage rights to gay couples.