Fight over gay marriage in Alabama echoes states' rights battles of past

MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's judicial building office overlooks Montgomery's Dexter Avenue, a history-soaked thoroughfare topped by the Alabama Capitol where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated president of the Confederacy and where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended the 1965 march for voting rights.

As gay and lesbian couples left a nearby courthouse clutching marriage licenses last week, Moore, an outspoken critic of gay marriage, was fighting to stop the weddings using a states' rights argument that conjured up those historical ghosts of slavery, the Civil War and the battle against desegregation.

There has been resistance in other states to the tide of rulings allowing gay marriage. Some Florida clerks' offices scrapped all marriage ceremonies rather than perform same-sex unions. In South Carolina and Georgia, legislation is being developed to let individual employees opt out of issuing marriage licenses to gay couples out of sincere religious belief. No state, however, went as far as Alabama, where Moore instructed the state's probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

Moore objected to a Jan. 23 ruling by U.S. District Judge Callie Granade in Mobile that Alabama's gay marriage ban violates the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection and due process. After the Supreme Court on Feb. 9 refused to stay the decision, Alabama became the 37th state -- plus the District of Columbia -- where gays and lesbians can legally wed.

Although he bristles at the link, Moore's action drew inevitable parallels with former Gov. George Wallace's 1963 "stand in the schoolhouse door" aimed at preventing federal court mandated desegregation at the University of Alabama.