Same-Sex Marriage: Meet the First Couples to the Courthouse

By Chris Good October 6, 2014

"Are you kidding?" Dawn Turton asked a cluster of reporters and cameramen outside the courthouse in Arlington, Virginia. "We couldn't wait."

Turton and her partner, Beth Trent, came as soon as they heard that the Supreme Court had declined to hear challenges to same-sex marriage. That announcement, made Monday morning, paved the way for lower-court rulings to stand and for same-sex marriage to be legally recognized in Indiana, Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma and Wisconsin-and for clerks at courthouses like this one to begin offering marriage licenses.

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"We had our ceremony in 2011, and so this was just, you know, making it official," Turton told reporters. She said she never expected same-sex marriage to be recognized in Virginia so quickly. Scoffing at the idea, she said she thought her home state would be last in the nation to do so.

"We did this in front of God and our congregation," she said. "This is just a legal step, and I think that's a huge affirmation."

Virginia's attorney general announced that licenses could be issued at 1 p.m. ET, and after about an hour during which Alexandria's clerk said no official word had been given, Turton and Trent got their paperwork done and headed outside to be legally married by their Baptist pastor, Marty Anderson, with a few friends looking on. Justin Smith and Jim Schey have been planning to marry at the end of the month, and they came from their reception site to the courthouse to be among the first same-sex couples in Virginia to obtain a marriage license.

They planned to hold their wedding in a park in Washington, D.C.; now, they say, they'll hold it in their home state of Virginia.

"I'm former military, 26 years in the Coast Guard, and I gotta tell you, this is better than repealing 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' by a long shot," Schey told reporters. "We just got something I've waited 48 years for."