Washington: Jessica Port wore a tan and black dress on her wedding day to match the tan button-down shirt and patterned necktie of her spouse-to-be, Virginia Anne Cowan.
Since California had recently begun to allow same-sex marriages, they had taken a vacation from their home in Washington D.C. to a San Francisco courthouse in 2008 to get married.
“We were just like every other couple, we really thought that this was it,” said Port, 30, who works as a counselor at a special education school. “We had nothing to worry about. We were just focused on marriage and future.”
They had no idea that one day their marriage would fall apart, and that their divorce would lead to a radical change in the legal status of same-sex marriages in Maryland.
Same-sex couples can currently marry in six states and the District of Columbia, and there’s no residency requirement to marry. That means that couples who live outside of those states can just pop in for a day to get married and then go home. There are also five states that allow civil unions.
But if a marriage should fall apart in a state that doesn’t recognize the couple’s legal status in the first place, that’s when things get complicated.
Some states that do not allow same-sex marriages to be performed also do not grant divorces for same-sex marriages that occurred outside of the state’s borders. It’s a tricky situation when a couple wants to dissolve their same-sex marriage, and neither spouse is a resident of a state that recognizes their marriage as legal and valid.
To satisfy the residency requirements, under these circumstances, you’d have to live in a state for six months to two years — depending on local laws — in order to get a divorce from a same-sex partner, said Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, which represented Cowan.
And in the case of Port and Cowan, a Maryland judge ruled in 2010 that the state’s constitution could not recognize their divorce, and denied their filing. They were both Maryland residents when they sought to dissolve their marriage, and Maryland was not a state that recognizes same-sex marriage.
It’s a predicament that lawyers such as Deborah Wald, of Wald & Thorndal P.C. in San Francisco, call being “wed-locked.” Wald is head of the National Family Law Advisory Council for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which represented Port. “We’re trying to help people sort out: Am I married or aren’t I? Where can I get divorced?” Wald said. “These are all issues that do not come up for different sexed couples at all.”
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