– Two couples already married in other states paid a small fee this afternoon to have their married licenses recorded in Mobile County Probate Court.

Legally, it counts for nothing. Alabama bans same-sex marriage and does not recognize legal unions from other states.

Still, the couples said they believe their actions today have an important symbolic meaning. Those marriage licenses now will be on record, viewable on the Probate Court website.

“It’s a good reference point to go back to legal documents,” said Kim McKeand, who married Cari Searcy in California in 2008 when same-sex marriages were legal in the Golden State.

Although California voters later overturned the same-sex marriage law in a referendum, the state still recognizes the marriage licenses it issue before that.

The WE DO Campaign, a project of the Campaign for Southern Equality, organized today's event. The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, the organization's executive director, said she was not disappointed that only two couples participated. She said they speak for many others who fear public exposure in a state that affords not legal protections against job and housing discrimination.

“It’s a very brave act for a couple to be out in this way,” she said.

Inside Probate Court offices, Sondra Scott and Jan Parker stepped up to the window and showed the clerk the Massachusetts marriage license that they obtained two months after same-sex marriage became legal there in 2004. Parker told the clerk that she and her partner had been together for 28 years.

“We would like to know what we have to do to have our marriage recognized by the state of Alabama,” she said.

The clerk summoned a supervisor, who directed the couple to another window where they could make a public record of their marriage license. They paid a $5.50 fee.

Outside the building, Scott and Parker said they ran a commercial laundry business in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and jumped at the chance to get legally married.

“Jan and I have been together for 28 years and have two children and two grandchildren,” Scott said.

Scott said their marriage status outside of a handful of states hit home when she got cancer and contemplated the implications for her spouse if she were to die.

“She nursed me back to health, and that means a lot,” Scott said.

A host of state and federal benefits, ranging from tax benefits to hospital visitation rights to inheritance benefits, do not apply to gay couples in Alabama.

Searcy said she faced the issue when her son needed heart surgery as an infant. She said she found that she had no legal rights to administer care in the hospital or make medical decisions for the boy since McKeand is the birth mother.

Searcy said she wants the same automatic rights every heterosexual married couple enjoys.

“We shouldn’t be considered legal strangers,” she said. “This is my wife.”

Although the state’s political environment may be hostile to same-sex marriage, McKeand and Searcy said they have faced no personal discrimination since moving to Mobile from Texas.

“Mobile seems to be pretty open-minded and welcoming,” McKeand said.

Searcy noted that she and McKeand, who have been together for almost 16 years, both come from small towns in east Texas. “To us, Mobile is a pretty big city.”

Scott said she and Parker have had similar experiences. She said that when the couple lost their business in a merger deal gone bad, they found themselves searching for a place with a lower cost of living where Social Security checks would stretch farther. She said they had talked about retiring in the South, anyway, because she originally is from Mississippi and they liked the warmer climate.

“Nobody seems to judge us,” she said.

Beach-Ferrara, the campaign organizer, said the group’s aim is to change marriage policy at the federal level. That would force states in the South, where she acknowledged that the prospects for marriage equality are remote, to at least honor legal marriages from other states.

“We have done everything in our power to express our full equality,” she told a small but enthusiastic group of supporters waiting for the couples who emerged from the Probate Court offices.

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