Despite a court ruling permitting same-sex couples to marry in Wisconsin, the state’s Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen remains steadfastly opposed to granting marriage certificates for gay and lesbian couples. The Attorney General insists that county clerks who grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples could be charged and fined 10,000 dollars for issuing the licenses. In addition, they could be sentenced to up to nine months in jail for issuing licenses for a same-sex marriage.
Sixty-three of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties are issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. However,?Van Hollen contends that they are doing so illegally, because the??judge who ruled that Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional did not explicitly instruct county clerks on what to do while the state appeals the ruling.
County clerks seem unmoved by the Attorney General’s warning. Dane County Clerk Scott McDonnell said the Attorney General’s threat to have county clerks prosecuted was not keeping him up at night. He added that, Van Hollen “needs to call off the dogs and turn off the fire hoses,” a clear reference to bigoted officials who resisted civil rights progress for black Americans during the 1960s.?
The civil rights analogy is an appropriate one as Van Hollen’s stubborn resistance to progress, hearkens back to that days of George Wallace and other Southern elected officials standing in school house doors to block integration. Although Van Hollen is trying to portray himself as a defender of tradition and the state’s constitution, he is of course standing on behalf of bigotry and narrow-mindedness even though he and others like him are clearly losing the battle nation wide.
Van Hollen may be trying to establish a legacy as a defender of the’state’s constitution, but his legacy instead will be that he failed to accept reality or progress when it stared him in the face. Instead of embracing a 21st century Wisconsin that joins many other state’s in eliminating discrimination against same-sex couples, Van Hollen has decided to go out with a tantrum, kicking and screaming against the forces of equality and progress. No matter, because in the end he will simply find himself on the wrong side of history. Meanwhile, county clerks across the state of Wisconsin will ignore him, because they know what the right thing to do is, and they will continue to issue licenses, whether they face jail time or not.
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Edited/Published by: SB
