Standing in front of their rural Alabama church, just outside a tiny town called Woodland (population 192), two white women in their 50s are making small talk while they wait for their husbands after evening service.



Impossibly polite and welcoming, and speaking in an enchanting southern drawl, they confide they are worried. The supreme court ruling granting marriage rights to same-sex couples across the nation has left them feeling like their religious beliefs and freedoms are under attack.

“It’s been on our minds a lot. We are not sure what to do,” one says.

That evening’s service featured a special guest preacher: John Eidsmoe, a Montgomery-based lawyer, pastor and employee of the Moral Law Foundation (the mission of which is to restore “the knowledge of God in law and government”).

Eidsmoe delivered a sermon on the merits of American exceptionalism, and posed before his audience that the US’s foundation was steeped in Christian belief, and that that linkage potentially made the country “exceptionally exceptional”.

John Eidsmoe at his desk. Photograph: Rose Hackman

Absent in his sermon was any mention of slavery, or the mass slaying of Native Americans (although one acknowledgement of the latter group’s fate was later found in his office, where a poster featuring Native Americans sarcastically states: “Turn in your weapons, the government will take care of you”).

As the sermon came to a close, congregants were asked if they had any questions for their guest, and some were finally able to ask the questions about gay marriage weighing on many of them.

“Under the new supreme court ruling, would a pastor who believes it is inherently sinful for a same-sex couple to marry be obliged to perform such an act?”

Eidsmoe hummed and hawed and presented slippery slopes for the future. The congregation looked worried.

In short, the answer is a clear no. But the terror among many here – that religious leaders are on track to being coerced into performing ceremonies they do not agree with – is real.

The conversation that followed centered on devout business owners with anti-gay marriage beliefs: what of the florists, the bakers, the photographers asked to provide services for same-sex weddings?

Here, the answer is not clear. Anti-gay marriage business owners refusing services to same-sex couples as they plan their weddings are indeed vulnerable of being accused of discrimination, although precedents are still being set.

Bethel East Baptist church in Alabama. Photograph: Rose Hackman

Back in front of the church, one of the congregants confides that her local probate judge in Cleburne County, Ryan Robertson, who is responsible for issuing marriage licenses, has found a way out of the dilemma. He has stopped giving licenses out all together. No marriage licenses for heterosexual couples, no marriage licenses for gay couples.

There’s no law-breaking discrimination if nobody is allowed to get married at all, the reasoning goes. You might call it floor-line equality.

The tactic has gained a certain degree of traction in Alabama over the last two weeks. According to latest data made available by organizers with Freedom to Marry – who are making daily calls to individual probate judges’ offices to track the progression of law-complying marriage license offices – 14 counties out of a total of 67 in Alabama are issuing licenses to no one, with a further three unconfirmed.

Fred Hamic, a 69-year-old probate judge in Geneva, Alabama, is one of them. Justifying his position, Hamic says that unlike in other states, Alabama law says probate judges “may” issue marriage licenses, but does not state that they “must”. This, he believes, allows him to legally put a freeze on some of his usual duties.

“I have chosen to issue no marriage licenses at all. I have chosen to interpret the law as it is written,” he said.

Two heterosexual couples have had their applications denied by his office since his position was first taken two weeks ago, he said, but he has not yet had any applications from same-sex couples.

Just a few miles to the east, in Houston County, Alabama, probate judge Patrick Davenport has also put a freeze on issuing marriage licenses. Davenport, however, has been able to face the source of his religious objection directly, having turned at least one same-sex couple away, in person.

Alabama native Keith Ingram, 31, and his partner Albert Pigg, 21, thought their day had finally come on Monday 29 June, when they turned up first thing in the morning to the courthouse in Dothan, Houston County, to get married. It was their fourth attempt.

After waiting three hours in their coordinated outfits, Ingram says the judge came out and told them they would not be able to get married, and that he was suspending the issuing of marriage licenses for 25 days.

“Once again, our expectations were crushed,” Ingram says, adding he grew up and spent most of his life in the area. “I feel I should be able to get married in my home county, in my home state.”

Alabama chief justice Roy Moore. Photograph: Rose Hackman

Probate judges like Hamic and Robertson appear to have the implicit support of the Alabama supreme court, on which nine elected Republican judges sit.

On 29 June, the body published an ambiguously worded order giving affected parties, including probate judges, 25 days to file briefs and motions reacting to the Obergefell US supreme court decision. It seems many probate judges have interpreted this as a 25-day moratorium on implementing new federal laws.

But Randall Marshall, Alabama’s American Civil Liberties Union’s legal director, warns such efforts to delay same-sex marriage are fruitless and hold no legal viability. They do, however, create confusion. Once the supreme court has ruled, the ruling is final and applies across the land.

The chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, Roy Moore, who was voted in as a man who believed in the inextricability of the Bible and the law, has only raised his voice against same-sex marriage louder in recent months, sending mixed messages to local officials under the illusion they may find a way to wriggle their way out of an unshakable supreme court decision.

“I dissent,” he exclaims succinctly in his intimidating office in Montgomery, before launching into an improvised one-on-one study session on the American constitution, complete with invitations to read out loud.

Moore says he is confident the decision will be overturned.

In 2002, during his first round as chief justice, in an opinion over a custody battle involving a lesbian mother, Moore invoked the state’s “power of the sword” that should be used to stop the “subversion of children toward this lifestyle”.

Keith Ingram, 31, and his partner Albert Pigg, 21. Photograph: Christiane Robinson

A couple days after delivering his sermon in Woodland, standing in his office in Montgomery, 70-year-old pastor Eidsmoe tells me he is worried for his three adult children, who are currently keeping their opinions about gay marriage to themselves within professional circles. The feeling is not far from one of persecution.

But to David Dinielli, a deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, cries of persecution over erosions of “religious liberties” should warrant little sympathy.

“Frankly, this is no different than what we went through in the 1960s with the fight over public accommodations. There is no difference between a baker in Arizona refusing to serve gay people and white people refusing to serve black people in restaurants after the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” he says.

Dinielli says the narrative being used by opponents to same-sex marriage in defense of religious freedoms is part of a tradition that has come to characterize white Christian culture since the end of slavery.

“The notion among white Christians in particular that they are under attack from all corners and have been beaten up over the last 150 years, that Christians are somehow going to have to renounce their Christianity: it’s completely ridiculous,” he says. “White Christians are hardly disenfranchised, they are hardly a persecuted group.”

A protester in front of the Jefferson County courthouse as same-sex couples wait for the doors to open so they can be legally married. Photograph: Hal Yeager/AP

Times, however, are undoubtedly changing.

During a protest in Dothan, Alabama, last week, Christopher Cherry, a 37-year-old graphic designer who has been organizing for marriage license issuances, says that around one-third of people passing by his group’s demonstration expressed support.

Jonathan Garner, a 29-year-old bartender in Montgomery, Alabama, says most of his friends think marriage equality is fine. It’s the older generations who are finding it harder to grapple with, he says.

“You’ve got all these people who are not used to it. This is the deep south. It’ll take another generation. You’ve got to give it time,” he says.

Younger devout Christians are also finding ways of dealing with it within their own faith. Brady Lassiter, a 25-year-old Alabaman and military trainee, preaches a message of love, but still frames homosexuality as sinful, finding it “forgivable” – on a par with other sins.

He says gay people deserve support and should not be judged. “If I had a drinking problem,” he says, “I would seek help in being held accountable to the standards of the Bible. I would want to know that the people around me and that are worshipping our God still love me. And the same goes for homosexuality. It’s not a hopeless situation, just like any other issue that has ever come up in the history of mankind.”

Lassiter’s church has groups for people dealing with homosexuality, he says. But if homosexuality is forgivable, same-sex marriage still seems to be, for him, “crossing the line”.