Angela Channell, right, and Dawn Hicks, left, display their marriage license for friends, supporters and the media on Friday, Feb. 13, 2015. Channell and Hicks were the first couple to apply for and receive a marriage license from Tuscaloosa county for a same sex marriage. Same-sex marriage now is legal in 37 states (and about 10 other states have become bi-curious), but apparently not in Alabama. After two federal court decisions gave gays the OK to walk down the aisle, elected Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore did his best imitation of George Wallace’s “Jim Crow standing in the schoolhouse door.” He instructed Alabama judges to stop issuing same-sex marriage licenses.
Chief Justice Moore looks like the mayor in the movie “Footloose.” He has one of those awful, “old Southern man, helmet hair” haircuts that makes a clear statement: “No gay guy has ever touched my hair.” It is an image Alabama and the South do not need.
Yet, this is just Alabama flexing its states’-rights muscles, trying to delay the inevitable. Gay marriage in Alabama eventually will be like gay marriage in almost any other state, except that somehow a houndstooth-print hat will be incorporated into the ceremony.
It is the position of Moore that homosexuals can marry – as long as they don’t try to marry each other. Liza Minnelli can’t marry them all. He seems like the type of guy who would continue to try to set up Jim Nabors on dates well after his show “Gomer Pyle” ended.
This is a fight that Barack Obama, who when he was only a candidate agreed with Chief Justice Roy Moore, will pursue. Attorney General Eric Holder’s office has the South on speed dial.