Rainbow bLAWg

Tennessee, the home of the Grand Ole Opry, Elvis, Jack Daniels, Beale Street blues, and the most hateful anti-gay state legislature in America, was ordered by a federal judge to recognize the legal same-sex marriages of three couples who were married in other states — despite the state’s constitutional amendment that defines marriage as between a man and woman.

Their marriages must be recognized temporarily while they pursue a lawsuit seeking to overturn Tennessee’s state DOMA. For now, Friday’s U.S. District Court ruling applies only to these three couples.

The couples, two female University of Tennessee professors who were married in New York; a fine arts graduate student from Memphis and his husband, a first sergeant in the U.S. Army; and a male couple from San Francisco who moved to Tennessee for work in 2012, filed their lawsuit in October.

Federal Judge Aleta A. Trauger noted that although her preliminary injunction against the state was limited only to the three couples named in the suit, before long, the ban would probably be upended for all same-sex couples in Tennessee.

At some point in the future, probably with the aid of further rulings, “in the eyes of the United States Constitution, the plaintiffs’ marriages will be placed on equal footing with those of heterosexual couples and … proscriptions against same-sex marriage will soon become a footnote in the annals of American history,” Trauger wrote.

Nashville lawyer Abby Rubenfeld, who represents the couples, cheered the legal win and said it was a good first step toward total equality for all same-sex married couples in Tennessee.

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Carrie Stone