May 20, 2008

Brian Baxter is Executive Director of the Reno based gay support organization A Rainbow Place and he expects many same sex couples from Nevada will go to California to get married, but once they return to the Silver State, neither the state nor the federal government will recognize the union. 

KUNR: PLAN Field Organizer Joe Edson supports California Supreme Court decision allowing same gender marriage and urges gay Nevadans to support the growing national significance of recognized same gender marriages by getting married in the Golden State even if the marriage will not be recognized in the Silver State.

May 20, 2008

RENO, NV - Brian Baxter is Executive Director of the Reno based gay support organization A Rainbow Place and he expects many same sex couples from Nevada will go to California to get married, but once they return to the Silver State, Baxter points out, neither the state nor the federal government will recognize the union.

Baxter: There's about eleven hundred rights that straight couples have when they get married that gay couples do not get, regardless of their relationship. I'm in a relationship for over ten years now, and as far as the government is concerned, I'm not in a relationship at all.

In 1996, president Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act that mandates the federal government only recognize marriages between partners of the opposite sex. And in Nevada, the state constitution was amended to reflect the same definition of marriage in 2002 after voters passed the Defense of Marriage Amendment by a 63 to 37 percent margin. Last year Massachusetts ok'd same sex marriages. Joe Edson is a field organizer for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. He and his partner own property in Massachusetts and were married there last summer. Edson says even though there are no expanded rights in Nevada, the ceremony was satisfying.

Edson: Having been able to marry in Massachusetts last summer, we felt that it was the first time that a legal entity recognize our relationship with a legal stamp of approval. I would encourage anybody to take advantage of the opportunity to go to California and have that validation put on it.

While the Massachusetts gay-marriage law only allows state residents to wed, California's law has no such limitation, and because of California proximity to Nevada activists expect to see an increase in the number of same sex couples seeking recognition of California marriages in Nevada.

Brian Bahouth KUNR News. © Copyright 2008, KUNR

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