(GayWebSource.com – Gay News & Press Network) – Posted by Jake Simpson – TheGayUK.com
The Washington Post ran a story this weekend about one of the very first known same-sex marriages in the US back in 1975.
Richard Adams and Anthony Sullivan came across a renegade Boulder County Clerk Clela Rorex who had decided to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after the Boulder district attorney’s office advised her that nothing in state law explicitly prohibited it. They tried to use the marriage so that Australian native Sullivan could remain in the US but they were totally unprepared by the brutality of the letter from a district director of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). He told them that their marriage could not be recognised because they:
“failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots,”
The couple fought the INS decision but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected them and the Supreme Court declined to hear their case. The 9th Circuit, in a decision by Judge Anthony Kennedy, now a Supreme Court justice who is just about to hear what may be the ultimate Case for same-sex marriage in the US next month, rejected Sullivan’s challenge against deportation.
Although Adams died in 2012, Sullivan has continued to keep their case and the issues behind it in the spotlight.
The government has since issued an apology written by León Rodriguez, director of INS successor the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which read:
“This agency should never treat any individual with the disrespect shown toward you and Mr. Adams. You have my sincerest apology for the years of hurt caused by the deeply offensive and hateful language used in the November 24, 1975, decision and my deepest condolences on your loss.”
P.S. The brave Court Clerk Clela Rorex was the target of a great deal of abuse and hate mail after making her groundbreaking decision. One day an angry local rancher turned up on the Court Room steps demanding a Marriage License for him and his horse. An unruffled Rorex was however quite prepared and simply asked the horse’s age. When she was told it was 8-years-old, she politely turned down the application because ‘she was underage’.
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