A federal ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in Alabama took effect Monday. But in up to 52 of the state’s 67 counties, most judges refused to go through with processing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, the International New York Times reports in its issue Tuesday.
Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court ordered Alabama’s judges to disobey the legalization. The Times reports that the order escalates “a legal showdown that echoed the battles over desegregation here in the 1960s.”
Marriage licenses to same-sex couples were however issued “quickly” in some of the state’s largest cities such as Birmingham, Huntsville and Montgomery.
ABOUT THE SOURCE: The International New York Times is the global edition of The New York Times, which was founded in 1851. The global edition was formerly called the International Herald Tribune, which was originally founded in 1887 as the Paris Herald, the European edition of the New York Herald.
