The celebration began early and built throughout the day in San Francisco, a city at the vanguard of the fight for gay rights.
Workers draped a giant rainbow flag over the front door of City Hall, where then-Mayor Gavin Newsom ignited a legal challenge to California’s same-sex marriage ban 11 years ago by ordering clerks to marry a gay couple in defiance of state law.
Newsom, who is now California’s lieutenant governor, reminisced at a news conference about that Valentine’s Day when he hoped that his action would spark a legal challenge.
“We were hoping to humanize the issue,” Newsom said of the first marriage performed at City Hall on Feb. 14, 2004.
Newsom said he’s couldn’t imagine then that gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
“I’d like to say I expected this day,” he said. “I didn’t. We hit a lot of rough patches along the way.”
A small number of same-sex marriage opponents protested the Supreme Court decision by unfurling a banner on a freeway overpass across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley.
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Arkansas
The judge who struck down Arkansas’ gay-marriage ban last year presided over one of the state’s first same-sex weddings after the Supreme Court’s historic ruling.
Pulaski County Judge Chris Piazza married two men in a brief ceremony in his Little Rock courtroom. He said it was the only same-sex wedding he planned to conduct.
“I looked at their faces and realized how much this meant to them,” Piazza said.
The couple, Tony Chiaro, 73, and Earnie Matheson, 65, have been together 26 years. They said they sought out Piazza because of his ruling last year.
“We could have gone off and done it somewhere else … but it meant so much to do it here,” Matheson said.
The Supreme Court’s ruling comes a little over a year after Piazza struck down a 2004 voter-approved amendment and an earlier state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
More than 500 couples were married in the week following Piazza’s ruling before it was suspended by the state Supreme Court pending a review.
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Source: abcnews.com