After last month’s ruling by the California Supreme Court gave same-sex partners the right to be married in that state, Silver Spring residents Claire Snyder and Mikki Hall decided to book a flight west.
The two women, who have been together for five years, are among the many gay and lesbian couples nationwide who have made arrangements to get married in California in wake of the ruling. They have an appointment next month to exchange vows at the county courthouse in San Francisco and receive a marriage license that, upon their return, will not be legally recognized by their home state.
It won’t be their first time. The couple was already married by a rabbi in a Maryland synagogue in 2006, but that union, too, is not recognized in Maryland, where last year the state’s highest court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage.
‘‘We didn’t need to debate whether we wanted to get married,” Snyder, 43, said of their decision to go to California. ‘‘We consider ourselves married even if the state doesn’t.”
Now that California joins Massachusetts as the second state in the union to grant gay and lesbian couples equal marriage rights, local advocates on either side of the debate are assessing how that California court decision changes the landscape here.
‘‘Our victory in California is a victory for the entire country,” said Dan Furmansky, director of the lobbying group Equality Maryland. ‘‘It certainly invigorates our own efforts.”
But Furmansky said Maryland is ‘‘falling behind” because it does not offer many of the domestic partner benefits other states do, such as the ability for an individual to obtain health insurance through a partner’s employer. Earlier this year, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) signed bills that will allow domestic partners to make medical decisions for one another and be exempt from paying property transfer taxes when one partner dies. But other benefits, such as exemption from state inheritance taxes, are still out of reach for gay couples in Maryland.
Same-sex marriage opponents, on the other hand, have argued that the bills signed by the governor were a step in the wrong direction and represent an effort to chip away at the institution of traditional marriage in Maryland.
‘‘They start us down the road California has taken,” said Richard J. Dowling, executive director of the Maryland Catholic Conference.
In an e-mail statement, Dowling said Maryland gay marriage proponents will continue to push for additional privileges, ‘‘and if our lawmakers are as compliant as they were this year, they’ll get them.”
Snyder, a government and politics professor at George Mason University, said she’s focused for now on enjoying the big day in San Francisco. She and Hall are planning a small ceremony, with Snyder’s boss’s nephew, who lives in San Francisco, as their only witness.
‘‘It should be bittersweet, but I’m just really excited,” she said. ‘‘I see the California decision as another step toward marriage equality. This is the civil rights struggle of our time, and I guess I’m focusing more on the fact that we’re able to get a marriage license.”
Takoma Park Mayor Bruce Williams, who is gay, said he was glad to see the ruling in California and hopes it doesn’t take long for other states to follow. California, he pointed out, lifted a ban on interracial marriage 19 years before the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage nationwide.
With a host of residents who have posted signs saying ‘‘Civil Marriage is a Civil Right” in their front yards, the City of Takoma Park has officially supported same-sex marriage on several occasions, most recently through a City Council resolution last October in reaction to the ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals.
Takoma Park and Montgomery County are also among the state jurisdictions that have taken steps to grant employer-provided benefits to domestic partners.
Williams has been with his partner, Geoffrey Burkhart, for 30 years, and said the two have drawn up a number of legal agreements to protect themselves. Whether they would get married if it became legal in Maryland is something he said they haven’t really discussed.
‘‘It wasn’t anything that we [ever] seriously had to consider,” he said. ‘‘I think we probably would for no other reason than all of the legal rights to come up.”
Williams said he is worried about a November ballot initiative in California that would rewrite the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage and could potentially overturn the marriages being granted now.
Dowling said he is confident that Maryland voters would reject a referendum on same-sex marriages.
Williams said that misses the greater argument about marriage equality.
‘‘People can talk about, ‘Well, it’s different than various other kinds of civil rights’— it’s not,” Williams said. ‘‘We’re all free when everybody has their equal rights.”
