Anticipating high court's blessing, same-sex couples plan weddings

Richard Wolf | USA TODAY

Mark Phariss and Vic Holmes have sent out "Save the Date" cards and plunked down thousands of dollars for their November wedding, which promises to be Texas-style big.

Brittany Rowell and Jessica Harbuck are busy laying plans for a January wedding in Mississippi, with traditional white dresses and all the trimmings.

Tim Love and Larry Ysunza have reserved their church for an October wedding in Kentucky, about the time of their 35th anniversary together.

Liz Neidlinger and Erika Doty have their sights set on an outdoor sculpture garden in Michigan next May.

Jon Coffee and Keith Swafford were engaged last October in Tennessee and decided to marry in a year, regardless of court action. If it had to be merely symbolic, that would be sufficient.

What sets the five couples apart from your average wedding planners is a small impediment: They can't get married in their home states — not yet, anyway. But they're so confident the Supreme Court will change that in the coming days that they already are making plans for the big day.

If the court decides gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, thousands of couples in the 13 states still without same-sex marriage will rush to local courthouses as soon as the doors are flung open.

These couples are different. Some might seek marriage licenses immediately, but only as a safeguard against backpedaling by states that may try to sidestep the high court's ruling. What they really want are old-fashioned weddings, and they're not waiting for the justices to act.

• Phariss and Holmes, plaintiffs in a Texas gay marriage lawsuit now pending at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, began planning their big day back in the spring. That was before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that's due to be decided by early next week.

They booked a Dallas venue, band and florist first, then a photographer and videographer, and even a Costa Rica honeymoon. They were sure the court was on their side.

"We were so convinced that the Supreme Court was going to rule that way that we were putting our money where our mouth was," says Holmes, 45, who plans to wear his former Air Force uniform for the ceremony.

Then they sat in court April 28 and watched as even Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has written the last three opinions advancing the cause of gay rights, noted that marriage has been an opposite-sex union for "millennia."

"I saw dollars flying out the window," Phariss, 55, says.

The pair has a couple of backup plans, neither of which will postpone the November celebration. They will apply for a marriage license immediately if the court strikes down state marriage bans, but only to guard against any potential roadblock Texas could throw in their path. And if the court rules only that states must recognize marriages licensed in other states, they will marry in Illinois and return for a Texas-size party.

"We've fought pretty hard for this," Holmes says. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We want it to be pretty special. We're trying to do it up right."

• Rowell, 24, and Harbuck, 27, have been planning a January 2016 wedding for about a year. They got engaged after a federal district judge in Mississippi tossed out the state's marriage ban last November. Since then, their case has been tied up at the appeals court level, along with the Texas case and a third from Louisiana.

In the deep South, it hasn't been easy. Only one of the venues they sought in the capital region around Jackson would accept a same-sex marriage, Rowell says.

"We had people that would just flat-out say, 'Absolutely not,'" she recalls.

Still, the two were determined to have what Rowell calls "a traditional Mississippi wedding" — church bells, white dresses, wedding cakes. Their guest list is hovering at about 100, after some trimming. A cousin serving in the military in South Korea plans to return for the ceremony.

"Everything I'm doing, I'm doing with the intention that the Supreme Court is going to rule in my favor," Rowell says. "We're just planning with the assumption that it's all going to come through."

• Love and Ysunza have waited longer to get married than Rowell and Harbuck have been alive. They're not willing to wait any longer.

Plaintiffs in the Kentucky litigation that has been consolidated at the Supreme Court along with cases from Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee, the pair will have been together 35 years this October. That's the month they've picked to wed at Clifton Universalist Unitarian Church in Louisville.

"We want to make sure we have a place," Love says about making reservations before the Supreme Court rules. "That's a special date for us already."

Church officials are as eager as Love and Ysunza, both 56, to begin holding gay weddings. Ever since Kentucky banned same-sex marriages in 2004, the small, progressive church has refused to hold any weddings, gay or straight. Now it plans to hold a full weekend of ceremonies after the high court rules.

Still, Love and Ysunza will wait until Oct. 10 rather than "jump on the bandwagon and have our anniversary the same as everybody else," Love says.

• Neidlinger and Doty haven't followed the legal proceedings as closely as the others. They just assume the court will rule in their favor — and if not, they just may go forward with a symbolic wedding ceremony next May anyway.

The Grand Rapids couple isn't involved in that state's litigation, now before the Supreme Court. Neidlinger and Doty are focused more on their own body clocks: at 30 and 32, they want to have children soon, and they want to be married first. So next May it is.

"We're going to get married regardless," Neidlinger says. "To us, it's just going to be a bonus if it passes."

• Coffee and Swafford have an advantage over the other couples: Coffee is well on the way to becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, and in a pinch he can perform marriages himself.

They are accustomed to states that don't favor gay marriage. The Knoxville couple lives in Tennessee, one of the states involved in the Supreme Court case; their families live in Kansas and South Carolina, two states where same-sex marriage is legal only because of federal court rulings.

If the court rules their way, Coffee, 26, and Swafford, 25, plan a quick courthouse marriage just in case anything changes. But regardless of how the justices rule, they plan to follow through with their November "wedding."

"We're going to go ahead and get married in November because we want to get married," Coffee says, "and we don't need a court to tell us that we're married or not."