Nov 6, 2008 12:26 pm US/Pacific
Last Bay Area County Stops Licensing Gay Marriages
SOLANO COUNTY (CBS5/KCBS/AP) ―
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Solano continued to issue licenses Wednesday, has now elected to stop.
AP
The one county still issuing same-sex marriage licenses the day after California voters passed Proposition 8 will no longer perform gay and lesbian weddings.
Solano County spokesman Stephen Pierce said clerks were allowed to issue same-sex licenses on Wednesday because the state Office Vital Records had not advised them to stop.
But concerns over whether those marriages performed after the passage of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a heterosexual institution have prompted the county to join the rest and err on the side of caution.
"The state hasn't changed the rules," Pierce said. "In the lack of a definitive answer, we're asking same-sex couples that we would wait so that we would be able to perform a ceremony and they would have a clear understanding of their legal status."
California Attorney General Brown said clearly that the 16,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to November 4 would not be invalidated even if Prop. 8 survives the three legal challenges filed with the California Supreme Court on Wednesday.
It's unclear whether any same-sex licenses were issued on Wednesday, Pierce said, because the forms are no longer gender specific. The county performs weddings only on Thursday and Friday, so no weddings gay or straight were performed Wednesday. He said any same-sex couple that shows up with a license from here forward will be turned away.
Solano County has performed an estimated 130 gay marriages since the court legalized them in May.
(© CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Bay City News contributed to this report.)
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