Q We love kids, but my partner and I don’t want them in or at our wedding—both the ceremony and the reception. We have a few reasons: We don’t want any babies wailing or children making random, distracting noises during the ceremony.

We want all our guests to have fun and let loose and not have to watch their kids at the reception. We’re serving alcohol at the reception, and we don’t want to worry about the legal issues of the older children being around it.

We’re inviting about 100 guests, and I’d say there are at least 15 couples with children. How do we politely tell them we don’t want their kids at our wedding?

A Babies and children are a blessing and can bring a youthful innocence to a wedding day, but they can be an awfully big distraction at special events, when they’re not properly attended to. If you’d rather your guests attend to you and the celebration at hand, by all means, make it an adults-only affair.

Here’s the thing about weddings. Proper wedding etiquette dictates that the people addressed on the envelope of the wedding invitation are the only ones invited. Thus, if you don’t write The Palladino Family or Mrs. and Mrs. Palladino and children, you haven’t invited any kids. Likewise, if you don’t write Kirsten Palladino and guest, but instead write Kirsten Palladino, you’ve only invited me and you’ve indicated that I shouldn’t show up with any random guest.

All those rules aside, not everyone knows proper wedding etiquette. Follow the above invitation guidelines, and you’ll still get a few response cards from a parent, his partner and their full brood. And that’s where you’ll get the opportunity to say something. If you get a response card indicating that more than you invited plan to attend, call the sender and delicately explain (but don’t beat around the bush) that your wedding day is going to be an adults-only affair and you and your partner aren’t allowing children. And you hope they understand and can still make it.

I’ve known people to actually have “adult-only reception to follow” printed on the bottom of their wedding invitations, but I think it can be tacky and perceived as hostile by some guests.

The other way to spread the word is through strategic comments to your friends without children who talk a lot to those who do. “We’re so excited about our adults-only wedding. It’s really going to be a grand affair. I hope so-and-so doesn’t mind that we’re not inviting any children.” That kind of talk is sure to get back to your other friends—and hopefully not ruffle any feathers.

You’ve probably considered by now that some of your guests with children won’t come if they can’t bring their kids. Not to make a statement, but for the simple fact that decent childcare can be hard to come by, especially if they’re traveling to another state for your wedding. If their presence is more important to you, consider hiring a nanny for your wedding to keep all the children occupied in a separate room nearby. As for the older children and booze, talk to your caterer or bartender about your concerns. If they need to check IDs to make you feel more comfortable, they’re your employees for the day.

Kirsten Palladino is the editor in chief of Equally Wed, the nation’s premier same-sex wedding magazine, online at http://www.equallywed.com. Equally Wed offers gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer couples a guide to their weddings, a social community and a marketplace of vetted LGBT-friendly wedding vendors. Follow Equally Wed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/equallywed.

Some began their new studies in mid-August. Others will begin their new studies post-Labor Day.

Many students, along with their parents and teachers, received some kind of orientation about how to make this new year a successful, safe, fun year.

In a sampling of notices from some Florida school districts in recent weeks, I found advice for students and parents on getting a sound sleep, the role of nutrition in learning, backpack safety, school bus safety, immunization, dress codes, the relationship between exercise and self-esteem, how to say “no” to drugs, the dangers of food allergens in the cafeteria and even a warning about children walking past swimming pools on their way to and from school.

What I didn’t find in the survey sample was any message about the consequences of bullying or the availability of school safety zones.

A caution about absences noted the most common reasons children miss school are colds, stomach flu, ear infections, pink eye and sore throat. But the caution omitted another reason children miss school: bullying, the taunting, intimidation, harassment and assault that can lead a child to fake a cold or develop a stomach ache to avoid going to class.

Some facts from the U.S. Health and Human Services Department:

• Studies show that 15-25 percent of U.S. students are bullied with some frequency.

• Studies show that 15-20 percent of U.S. students reported they bullied others with some frequency.

• As many as 160,000 students may stay home on any given day because they’re afraid of being bullied.

• Studies show that children who bully are more likely to get into fights, vandalize property and drop out of school. About 60 percent of boys who were bullies in middle school had at least one criminal conviction by the age of 24, according to one study.
Some more facts from the Safe Schools Coalition and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network:

• Anti-LGBT bullying is one of the most pervasive forms of bullying and often the weapon of choice for bullies, regardless of the bullied student’s sexual orientation.

• Among students who identified as LGBT, 90 percent had been bullied in a given year. Of those, 66 percent had been verbally abused, 16 percent physically harassed and 8 percent had been assaulted.

• Students who have been bullied at school because of their gender are more likely than their peers to have carried a gun to school.

• Students who have been bullied at school because of their gender are more likely than their peers to attempt suicide.

• Students who have been bullied at school because of their gender are more likely than their peers to skip school.

One more fact from the Safe Schools Coalition: School districts and individual schools that are pro-active in dealing with bullying and harassment see diminished truancy and far fewer violent incidents.

So it’s troublesome that any districts are starting another school year skirting or downplaying this issue.

Anti-bullying notices should be going out in the back-to-school orientation packets with new school bus schedules, school lunch applications and class assignments.

At a federal summit on the subject just a few weeks ago, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said too often bullying gets shrugged off. “You have heard all the excuses,” Duncan told an assembly of educators, therapists and government officials. “You have heard the lineup of reasons to minimize the gravity of bullying and to dismiss the potential of effective programs to reduce it. ‘What can you do?’ people say, “bullying has been going on forever. Kids are mean.’ Or ‘she just made a bad joke.’ ‘He didn’t mean to hurt anyone.’ ‘It was just a one-time thing.’ ‘Bullying may be wrong. But it really isn’t an educational issue.’ At the heart of this minimization of bullying, is a core belief that bullying is an elusive concept that can’t really be defined.”

But bullying is definable, as Duncan said.

And incidents of bullying should not be shrugged off, nor should districts shrug off the responsibility to warn students, parents and teachers that bullying will not be tolerated.

Back to school for a child should not mean back to being bullied, nor should it mean back to bullying.

For more information about bullying prevention, go to http://www.stopbullyingnow.hrsa.gov/kids/

So it seems a bit abstract, at the moment, to be wondering about whether this is the right fight when it’s actually the battle being waged – again and again, in state after state. And the case has already given rise to a number of questions by 365gay readers, so I’ll try to answer them here.
 
The complaint in this case was filed pro se, meaning that the parties are representing themselves. Although information about the case (including the complaint itself) is hard to find, your intrepid columnist did finally track down this exclusive interview  with one of the plaintiffs, David Shupe-Roderick. Although other sources have suggested that the plaintiffs couldn’t afford an attorney, Shupe-Roderick states that he and his (all-but-legal) spouse Ryan W. Dupree did seek out private attorneys who were “unable to help” them. So they’re going it alone.
 
The complaint itself, whatever its defects from the standpoint of legal drafting, is simple and compelling: By denying the couple the right to marry, Wyoming has acted in contravention of the guarantees of equality and due process found in the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, if the judge follows the full-trial route that Judge Walker took in the Prop 8 case, Shupe-Roderick and Dupree will be at a substantial disadvantage. But the judge, Alan B. Johnson (a Reagan appointee) might simply decide the case on pure legal grounds. In that case, the playing field would be much more level, as the judge can read the cases and decide based on precedent and his own sense of what the constitution requires.

Or perhaps a local lawyer or advocacy group will now sign on to help these guys.
 
Like the Prop 8 case, this one stands solely on the federal constitution, not on Wyoming’s own state constitutional guarantee of equality. Because it’s in federal court, federal law needs to be invoked in order for the court to have jurisdiction.

Federal courts can sometimes hear state law claims – it’s too complicated to explain here, but there are procedural doctrines that let federal courts decide state law claims if related to the federal ones – but this complaint doesn’t raise them. (In contrast, claims brought in state court can allege state or federal constitutional violations, or both; most of the marriage challenges have rested their claims purely on state constitutions, thereby insulating the cases from Supreme Court review.)
 
These federal cases are quickly turning into a procedural thicket. There’s the DOMA challenge in Massachusetts, the Prop 8 litigation in California, and now this. Each of these is in a different federal “circuit,” of which there are currently12. Thus, until the Supreme Court weighs in, there’s the potential for a confusing battery of inconsistent decisions, affecting different laws and rights but all related to marriage. Such a situation is ultimately untenable, and the more these cases crop up, the greater will become the pressure on the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Meanwhile, we wait for our rights.
 
What should we make of Shupe-Roderick and Dupree’s decision to file this suit? This isn’t exactly the careful, textbook approach that advocacy groups have followed so far. Without first-rate representation, the odds of success of course go down. There are pitfalls everywhere, and a couple of non-lawyers could trip over any number of procedural obstacles (including standing to sue, depending on the facts).
 
But we shouldn’t disparage the efforts of these two men. Their frustration at the glacial pace of change, and outrage over the injustice of denying them basic equality, is shared by millions of LGBT people everywhere. It shows up in litigation, in local public health campaigns for information and basic services, in protests, and in so many other ways.
 
And this approach of filing suit without the blessing of advocacy groups, or even of heavyweights like Boies and Olson, isn’t new – the first wave of challenges to discriminatory marriage laws came back in the early 1970’s. While the best known of these, Baker v. Nelson, led to (weak) Supreme Court precedent against marriage equality – the appeal was dismissed for lack of a “substantial federal question”—all of these efforts can serve a valuable educational purpose, reminding those in the persuadable middle that there are actual people with a compelling need for simple justice.

John Culhane is Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law Institute at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del. He blogs about the role of law in everyday life, and about a bunch of other things at: http://wordinedgewise.org.

Q I’m thinking of taking my partner’s last name after we marry, but some of our friends have been giving me a hard time about this. The gays say I’m trying to conform to a heterosexual world, and the straights say name changing is antiquated. All I want to do is show the world that me and my hubby are a family now, a united front. Where do you stand on this?

A As someone who changed her last name after marrying her partner, I fully support changing your name to match his, him taking yours, you hyphenating your names or even forming a new last name. It’s entirely up to you.

While I can appreciate what your friends are saying, you’re not conforming to a heterosexual or outdated world. You’re merely taking part in society as you see fit for you and your family. The definition of family is certainly changing and couples (and parents) with different last names are everywhere. But that doesn’t mean you have to take part in that.

You didn’t mention whether or not your marriage will be legally recognized, but often times, taking your partner’s last name or vice versa helps us to validate our relationship in society’s eyes. One day soon hopefully, you’ll have the rights to go along with your marriage.

Kirsten Palladino is the editor in chief of Equally Wed, the nation’s premier same-sex wedding magazine, online at http://www.equallywed.com. Equally Wed offers gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer couples a guide to their weddings, a social community and a marketplace of vetted LGBT-friendly wedding vendors. Follow Equally Wed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/equallywed.

Q I’m thinking of taking my partner’s last name after we marry, but some of our friends have been giving me a hard time about this. The gays say I’m trying to conform to a heterosexual world, and the straights say name changing is antiquated. All I want to do is show the world that me and my hubby are a family now, a united front. Where do you stand on this?

A As someone who changed her last name after marrying her partner, I fully support changing your name to match his, him taking yours, you hyphenating your names or even forming a new last name. It’s entirely up to you.

While I can appreciate what your friends are saying, you’re not conforming to a heterosexual or outdated world. You’re merely taking part in society as you see fit for you and your family. The definition of family is certainly changing and couples (and parents) with different last names are everywhere. But that doesn’t mean you have to take part in that.

You didn’t mention whether or not your marriage will be legally recognized, but often times, taking your partner’s last name or vice versa helps us to validate our relationship in society’s eyes. One day soon hopefully, you’ll have the rights to go along with your marriage.

Kirsten Palladino is the editor in chief of Equally Wed, the nation’s premier same-sex wedding magazine, online at http://www.equallywed.com. Equally Wed offers gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer couples a guide to their weddings, a social community and a marketplace of vetted LGBT-friendly wedding vendors. Follow Equally Wed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/equallywed.

In June the Harrisons applied to enroll Olivia in the school. On the application, they crossed out the word “father” and instead indicated that Olivia has two mothers, according to MSNBC.

When the mothers attended parents’ night on Tuesday, just a week before the first day of school, they were told that Olivia could not enroll in the school because her mothers were a lesbian couple.

“I am horribly disappointed. In fact, we are in the 21st century and we are still dealing with this issue. We should just move on. Denying my daughter education based on who I end up sleeping with at the end of the day makes me furious,” said Jill.

The school is associated with the Anglican Church, a change since it recently parted its ties with the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church is facing a split, as some dioceses are accepting of gays and lesbians, and some are not. The Episcopal Church selected openly gay Gene Robinson to be a bishop in 2003. It is considered the only mainstream church to have ever selected an openly gay bishop who was not celibate.

“It’s hard to believe that a place that’s supposed to take in and teach children about God and the basics of religion would actually discriminate against her because of who we are,” said Tracy.

We are a church affiliated with the Anglican Church in North America, and it is their policy that we don’t provide services to individuals or families that do not behave properly. We’re going off our canons that say ‘The Anglican Church in North America affirms our Lord’s teaching that the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony is in its nature a union permanent and lifelong of one man and one woman,” said Kenneth Monk, head of the school.

The Harrison’s were refunded their application fee and enrolled Olivia in a secular school where same-sex parents are okay.

 Douthat denies that marriage “has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman” and that the nuclear family “is the universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.”

 “What we think of as ‘traditional marriage,’” he rightly notes, “is not universal.”

 But Douthat’s piece is also notable because he offers a relatively clear version of a less familiar anti-equality argument. Briefly, the argument is that heterosexual relationships differ in important ways from both gay relationships and lesbian relationships, and that stretching marriage to cover all three kinds of pairings (male-female, male-male, female-female) would dilute its purposes.

 In Douthat’s words, preserving lifelong heterosexual monogamy as unique and indispensable “ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.”

 To his credit, Douthat is not simply making the argument that “Straight people are really special and they need a special institution to honor how special they are” (though at times he does seem oblivious to heterosexual privilege, and correspondingly, to the needs and interests of gays and lesbians). Rather, he’s worried about the unique stakes of heterosexual relationships, especially that they make babies. In a follow-up post, he cites the celibate lesbian Catholic writer Eve Tushnet :

 “If you have a unisex model of marriage, which is what gay marriage requires, you are no longer able to talk about marriage as regulating heterosexuality and therefore you’re not able to say: Look, there are things that are different about heterosexual and homosexual relationships. There are different dangers, there are different challenges, and, therefore, there are probably going to be different rules.”

 It’s the combination of an obvious point with a blatant non-sequitur that makes this argument so specious.

 The obvious point is that straight relationships, gay male relationships, and lesbian relationships each have distinct challenges. (They also share many of the same challenges, a fact that Douthat mostly ignores.)

 And yes, among the unique challenges of heterosexual relationships is that they create babies. No surprise there.

 The non-sequitur is his move from the reasonable premise about distinct challenges for heterosexuals, to the conclusion that extending marriage to gays and lesbians would render it unable to address those heterosexual challenges. Tushnet goes so far as to claim that we would no longer even be able to SAY that there are differences between heterosexual and homosexual relationships, much less maintain marriage in a way that addresses them.

 What amazes me about this conclusion is not just its apparent ignorance of gay and lesbian relationships, and the significant ways in which our challenges—of commitment, care, childrearing, intimacy, security, and so on—overlap with those of our heterosexual neighbors.

 What really amazes me is its apparent ignorance of the great diversity of HETEROSEXUAL relationships, with their “different dangers… different challenges, and…different rules.”

 To take just one example, consider a pair of elderly widowed heterosexuals who marry. Does anyone imagine that their challenges are exactly similar to those of young newlyweds? Does anyone presume that, by treating them as married, we lose the ability to acknowledge that the stakes are different for them (and for society) than they were in the case of their first marriages?

 The fact is that we acknowledge a wide variety of relationships as marriages that are nevertheless “distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit”: some with children, some without; some involving young lovebirds; some involving mature companions; some domestic, some long-distance, and so on.

 Gays and lesbians make up a relatively small minority of the population—smaller, certainly, than infertile and elderly heterosexuals. (Douthat notes that infertile and elderly heterosexuals grew up “as heterosexuals”—which is true, but irrelevant to the point that we can acknowledge their “distinct challenges” while still addressing the needs of the fertile.)

 In order to make his position plausible, Douthat would need to show that the stakes are so radically different for gays or lesbians that any form of marriage that includes this small minority can no longer do the requisite work for (fertile) heterosexuals.

 But at this crucial point Douthat’s argument becomes hopelessly vague. He simply asserts that extending marriage to same-sex couples would weaken its ability to address the thick “interplay of fertility, reproductive impulses and gender differences in heterosexual relationships,” but he never explains why or how this would happen.

 This is not an argument: this is a panic.

John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears Fridays at 365gay.com.

 To learn more about John or see clips from his DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.

First, let’s look at what might be thought of as the logical sequence:

 First up would be the abolition of laws criminalizing same-sex intimacy. It’s hard to see how rights can be built before acts that are “closely correlated with being homosexual” (to borrow Justice O’Connor’s phrase from Lawrence v. Texas) are made legal.

 Indeed, Justice Scalia’s principal objection to the Lawrence decision appears to have been that the decriminalization of homosexual acts undermined the foundation of laws that walled us off from many other rights of citizenship; for example, one federal court had justified the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy by the fact that homosexual intimacy was illegal.

Photo credit: Celeste Lavin

Next in the chain of achievements might come laws that would prohibit discrimination in the private sector, such as housing or employment. Since everyone (or many of us, anyway) need a job and a place to live, permitting our exclusion from these necessities works a substantial hardship – when compared to, say, the right to marry.

But I want to put anti-discrimination laws to one side, because there’s a crucial difference between government-sponsored inequality and discrimination in the private sector. That’s not to say government shouldn’t get involved in passing laws directing private conduct, but that at least government isn’t directly doing the discriminating.

Moving on, we reach the last few markers of full citizenship that have been denied to the LGBT community: the right to serve in the military and the right to marry. It seems like DADT is about to be lifted, so that leaves marriage.

 So, on the federal level at least, things seem to be proceeding in the kind of neat, pyramid-like structure that builds from broad foundations to a pinnacle of equality. And in states, too, the most progressive places on LGBT issues seem to move in some kind of predictable sequence, although different laws apply: decriminalizing same-sex intimacy; passing hate crimes law covering sexual orientation; then on to anti-discrimination law; inclusive family legislation (including adoption); and, for a few, all the way through to marriage equality.

One reason we might care about this sequence is for the reality check it provides: It’s hard to expect progress on marriage equality in, say, Florida, where a whole battery of laws and underlying public attitudes construct a pervasive subordination of LGBT lives. Perhaps surprisingly, my home state of Pennsylvania isn’t much better; although several cities (including Philadelphia, where my family and I live) have anti-discriminations law, the state does not. So it’s not surprising that State Senator Daylin Leach told me that he couldn’t even get hearings scheduled on his marriage equality bill. The groundwork’s not been laid for this monumental a shift.

That’s why some of us are so invested in the Prop 8 case and the challenge to DOMA: If we can win marriage equality on a federal level, the rest of the pieces should fall quickly into place.

There’s one jarring, non-sequential step, though: Here in the U.S., the rights of gays and lesbians to adopt has preceded the right to marry. In European countries, it’s often been the other way around; first, establish the right to have same-sex unions declared equal to opposite-sex ones, and then move towards gay and lesbian parents. That’s what happened, albeit at warp speed, in Mexico, where the Supreme Court first declared that all states within Mexico had to recognize same-sex marriages from Mexico City, and only then resolved to permit these couples to adopt children. (Here’s a good summary of how it unfolded.)

In the U.S., of course, it’s been quite the opposite: most states allow same-sex couples to adopt (or at least don’t specifically restrict our doing so), but withhold the right to marry. This creates the upside-down situation in which we can create families, but are legal strangers to our parental partners and de facto spouses.

Why? I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts on this (and readers of this column aren’t known for holding back), but I think the reasons have to do with some kind of unarticulated and inconsistent mix of practicality (we need all the adoptive parents we can get) and, sadly, a lack of real concern about these same children by conservative forces who’d be the ones to squawk; or at least enough of a hands-off approach from them that the state and private agencies seeking to place children retain the political and rhetorical power to act in children’s best interests.

In the long run, though, this situation is untenable. By creating (or allowing) this situation to exist, the anti-equality forces have only helped to ensure that marriage equality is inevitable. It doesn’t even scare Glenn Beck any more.

John Culhane is Professor of Law and Director of the Health Law Institute at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Del. He blogs about the role of law in everyday life, and about a bunch of other things at: http://wordinedgewise.org.

But the Department of Justice has still not indicated whether it intends to appeal those decisions to the 1^st Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

In fact, according to DOJ attorney Scott Simpson, who is leading the case filed by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, the government has not yet decided whether it will appeal.

Simpson declined to discuss the process further and directed a reporter to a media specialist at DOJ, who said only that she has “no updates” on that matter at this time.

The cases are Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, brought by GLAD, and Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services, brought by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Both lawsuits challenged Section 3 of DOMA, which limits the definition of marriage for federal benefits to straight couples. Tauro ruled that Section 3 violates the right of gay people to equal protection under the constitution, as well as the state’s right to the sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents.

The rules of procedure for federal courts indicates the government has 60 days from when a judge “enters” his or decision to file its appeal.

Although Judge Tauro issued his opinion in the two DOMA cases on July 8, he did not “enter” the decisions –a procedural formality—until August 12.

 According to court spokesman Frank Perry, the most recent federal court rules of procedures specify that the count is a simple calendar day one. So, barring some unforeseen development or request for extension of the ordinary deadline, the government has until October 11 –which will be easy enough for the LGBT community to remember because  it’s National Coming Out Day.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals imposed an emergency stay Monday on a trial court judge’s ruling overturning the ban, known as Proposition 8. Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker had ordered state officials to stop enforcing the measure starting Wednesday, clearing the way for county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

“It’s saddening just to know that we still have to keep waiting for this basic human right,” Marcia Davalos, of Los Angeles, a health care advocate who had planned to marry her partner, Laurette Healey, said when the stay was issued Monday. “We were getting excited and then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Ugh.’ It’s a roller-coaster.”

Lawyers for the two gay couples who challenged the ban said Monday they would not appeal the panel’s decision on the stay to the U.S. Supreme Court. They said they were satisfied the appeals court had agreed to fast-track its consideration of the Proposition 8 case by scheduling oral arguments for the week of Dec. 6.

“Today’s order from the 9th Circuit for an expedited hearing schedule ensures that we will triumph over Prop. 8 as quickly as possible,” said Chad Griffin, president of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, a group funding the effort to get the voter-approved gay marriage ban permanently overturned. “Our attorneys are ready to take this case all the way through the appeals court and to the United States Supreme Court.”

Attorneys for backers of the voter-approved measure applauded the decision. In seeking the emergency stay, they had argued that sanctioning same-sex unions while the case was on appeal would create legal chaos if the ban is eventually upheld.

“Invalidating the people’s vote based on just one judge’s opinion would not have been appropriate, and would have shaken the people’s confidence in our elections and the right to vote itself,” said Andy Pugno, general counsel for the coalition of religious and conservative groups that sponsored Proposition 8.

Under the timetable laid out Monday, it was doubtful a decision would come down from the 9th Circuit before next year.

A different three-judge panel than the one that issued Monday’s decision will be assigned to decide the constitutional question that many believe will eventually end up before the Supreme Court.

County clerks throughout the state had been preparing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples for the first time since Proposition 8 passed in November 2008. The measure amended the California Constitution to overrule a state Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex unions earlier that year.

“I’m sad, but I’m also glad that I didn’t pay the $100 to reserve an appointment at the clerk’s office,” said Thea Lavin, 31, of San Francisco, who had planned to wed her partner, Jess Gabbert, 30, if the stay were denied. “This has happened so many times before where we take two steps forward, one step back.”

Walker ruled on Aug. 4 that Proposition 8 violated the equal protection and due process rights of gays and lesbians guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

The ban’s sponsors appealed that ruling and also asked the 9th Circuit to block same-sex weddings in the meantime. They claimed in papers filed with the 9th Circuit that gay marriages would harm the state’s interest in promoting responsible procreation through heterosexual marriage.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown had joined lawyers for the plaintiffs in urging the appeals court to allow the weddings this week, arguing that keeping the ban in place any longer would harm the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

In a two-page order granting the stay, the appeals court panel did not indicate why it was keeping Proposition 8 in effect until it could consider the appeal of Walker’s verdict.

But it ordered Proposition 8 sponsors to address in their opening brief due Sept. 17 whether they even have the legal right to try to have the trial judge’s ruling overturned. Both Brown and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original defendants in the case, have said they support same-sex marriage and refused to defend Proposition 8 in court.

“The delay is excruciating and heartbreaking I know for the couples, but the ruling did include a significant victory by expediting the case and by highlighting that the proponents have a heavy lift to show they even have the right to bring an appeal,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “So those aspects of today’s ruling do go some way legally to counterbalance the disappointment.”

Currently, same-sex couples can legally wed only in Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.