Alicia Butler, a 43-year-old lawyer, and Judith Chedville, 38, a first lieutenant in the Texas Army National Guard’s medical command, met while they were both playing in a recreational soccer league in Dallas in 2001.

Twelve years later, the women still play soccer together, now as a married couple. While their home state of Texas doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, they held a commitment ceremony in Hawaii in 2005, and officially tied the knot in Marin County, Calif., in the fall of 2008. Their wedding took place just three days before California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state until the measure was later ruled unconstitutional. Butler and Chedville's marriage was among approximately 18,000 that are still considered valid.

Now living in Austin with their 8-month-old daughter, Butler and Chedville were elated when the U.S. Department of Defense announced in August that starting on Sept. 3, the same-sex spouses of military service members would be eligible for the same health care, housing and other benefits afforded to opposite-sex military spouses. Following the Supreme Court’s June ruling that invalidated portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which had denied LGBT couples certain benefits, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel wrote to Pentagon officials that “it is now the department's policy to treat all married military personnel equally."

So Chedville, who had served in Iraq and Kuwait, and Butler gathered the necessary paperwork in order to register Butler for an ID card through the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS), the federal database where all military members and their spouses must enlist to qualify for military benefits.

“We had heard a rumor before that Texas might be giving people trouble,” Butler told Al Jazeera in reference to signing up for benefits as the same-sex spouse of a Texas Army National Guard member. “We didn’t think it was real.”

So they showed up at Camp Mabry, their local National Guard base in Austin, on the morning of Sept. 3, bringing their California marriage license and certified copies of birth certificates.

When they walked in, Butler recalled that the desk clerk announced, “’Oh, it’s one of those,”’ referring to the fact that she was a guard member’s same-sex spouse. The clerk called her supervisor, who informed the women — politely, Butler emphasized — that the state of Texas couldn’t enroll them in DEERS.

Instead, he told them, they’d have to travel to a federal base to apply for an ID card, a three-hour round trip from Austin by car, because the federal government’s new stance on DOMA contradicts Texas’ state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The supervisor provided them with a memo written by the adjutant general of Texas, Maj. Gen. John Nichols, who heads the Texas Military Forces, including the National Guard. Nichols wrote that the state and federal laws are at odds, but that “the law seems well settled that members of the National Guard of the various states are under control of the state, except in times of war.”

So ultimately, the Texas National Guard was obligated to obey state law, the supervisor said. The women asked whether Chedville could travel to the federal base at Fort Hood alone to enroll Butler on her behalf and then allow Butler to pick up her ID card in Austin, since it would be inconvenient for them to travel with their infant. But they were told that no, Camp Mabry could not even issue Butler an ID.

Butler felt humiliated by the incident. “I’m 43 years old and a trial lawyer, so obviously I’ve got a thick skin,” she said. “Nonetheless, it was pretty upsetting.”

She added, “I think it’s just ridiculous that we would be expected to go through stuff like that, driving here and there, and taking time off work ... The federal government ought to recognize this, and (DEERS is) a federal program.”