Same-Sex Marriages Legal In New York.

 

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Sephanie Spahr-LaFroscia (left) and Theresa LaFroscia (right) finished up paperwork before they were married on Monday at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau in the Office of the City Clerk.Clerk’s offices in hundreds of rural and suburban towns across New York began offering marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples for the first time on Monday, even as a conservative group filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s Marriage Equality Act and nullify the same-sex marriages, reports the New York Times.

 

Audio & Photos

Portraits From the New York City Marriage Bureau

Slide Show

A Gay Wedding Album

Related

• After Long Wait, Same-Sex Couples Marry in New York(July 25, 2011)

Enlarge This Image

Doug Benz/Reuters

Forty-six couples were married on Monday in a ceremony at Niagara Falls. More Photos »

And in New York City and the other communities that had opened their offices Sunday for same-sex weddings, a steady but slower flow of newly eligible couples sought licenses on Monday.

State officials said they did not yet have statistics to indicate how many gay and lesbian couples had sought licenses in the first two days of legal same-sex marriage, but a survey of clerks in several of the state’s largest cities and towns suggested that at least 1,200 licenses had been issued. Most of the licenses were issued in New York City, home to about 40 percent of the state’s population.

The group that filed the lawsuit on Monday, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, claimed that the State Senate violated the state’s open meetings law in the run-up to its vote on the marriage bill and acted improperly in closing the Senate lobby to members of the public.

The lawsuit also asserted that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had no basis for invoking a procedural manoeuvre that allowed lawmakers to vote on the marriage bill immediately after the language was drawn up, rather than waiting for three days, as is usually required.

“Constitutional liberties were violated,” said the Rev. Jason J. McGuire, the executive director of the group, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms. “Today we are asking the court to intervene in its rightful role as the check and balance on an out-of-control State Legislature.”

Spokesmen for the Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos, and the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, declined to comment on the lawsuit. A spokesman for the governor said it had no merit.

“The plaintiffs lack a basic understanding of the laws of the State of New York,” the spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said in a statement.

The Monday weddings — many of them in communities that had not opened their clerk’s offices on Sunday — were accompanied by considerably less fanfare and media attention than those that took place on Sunday, when New York became the sixth and largest state with legalized same-sex marriage.

“The first couple that came in, they said: ‘We don’t want any pictures. We don’t want any craziness. We just want to get married. We’ve been waiting a long time,’ ” said Carol Quirk, the town clerk in Babylon, where nine same-sex couples received marriage licenses. “I was like: ‘Hey, fine. We’ve got nobody here.’ ”

In Brookhaven, where 37 couples received licenses during special hours on Sunday, only five couples had shown up Monday by late afternoon.

And in Binghamton, where 15 gay couples received licenses on Sunday, only one couple sought a license Monday — and they came only because they showed up on Sunday without the right documentation.

Traffic was relatively light even at offices in large municipalities that had not opened on Sunday. On Long Island, the clerk’s office in Oyster Bay had given out four marriage licenses to same-sex couples by Monday afternoon. In Hempstead, the number was eight.

But gay marriage festivities continued in some parts of the state on Monday. In Niagara Falls, where a lesbian couple married at midnight on Sunday, 46 other same-sex couples wed in a group ceremony on Monday that local tourism officials said was meant to kick off a campaign to make the city a wedding and honeymoon destination for gay couples.

And in Times Square, a nondenominational Christian minister drove from Ontario to officiate at weddings all day Monday in front of the TKTS booth. Six couples who had received their licenses on Sunday showed up and wed, as tourists cheered them on, according to the minister, the Rev. Connie Howes.

“We got so many thumbs-up,” Ms. Howes said as she drove back to Canada on Monday night. “Everyone seemed to be in a celebratory mood.”

New York State, which has 19.4 million residents, is home to about 65,300 same-sex couples, according to the 2010 Census. An analysis by the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy, at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, projected that about 13,300 of New York State’s gay couples would choose to marry over the next year.

“There is absolutely a surge,” said Gary J. Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute who studies the gay and lesbian population. “But I think the evidence suggests that a lot of these couples take this very seriously — it’s marriage — and they don’t rush, necessarily.”

Same-Sex Marriages Begin in Communities Statewide - NYTimes.com