This week, an employee at the Casey County Clerk’s Office in Kentucky said on the phone that officials are not issuing marriage licenses to anyone — not to same-sex couples or different-sex couples. Nobody at the office would explain the reasoning for the decision, she said, and hung up the phone. BuzzFeed News called back to ask why and get her name, but she hung up again.



A few miles south at the Clinton County Clerk’s Office, an employee hung up when asked if the county was issuing marriage licenses since the Supreme Court’s June ruling for marriage equality. Another call back, another hang up.

Farther east in the Bluegrass State, however, the elected clerk of Rowan County is perfectly clear about her reasoning and practices.

Kim Davis is doing battle with four couples and Gov. Steve Beshear in federal court, arguing in court documents this month that she has a religious objection to her name appearing on the marriage licenses of same-sex couples. So instead, Davis barred all six of her deputies at the Rowan County Clerk’s Office from issuing marriage licenses to anybody — even though at least one deputy clerk was willing.

A federal judge ordered Davis and her office on Wednesday to start issuing licenses, but when a same-sex couple applied for a license the next morning, staff at the office refused.

Cases like these are the exception since the Supreme Court’s June 26 watershed ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, after which the states that still had bans on same-sex couples marrying accepted the ruling. Governors in all those states, albeit some more slowly and reluctantly, since said their state’s policy now reflects the court’s decision. Hundreds of counties in the South and Midwest have updated forms, accepted same-sex couples tying the knot, and issued licenses.

But BuzzFeed News has found more than a dozen counties in which local government officials either refuse to solemnize marriages or refuse to issue marriage licenses entirely. Probate judges and magistrates are refusing to perform marriages in Nebraska counties, for example, while, as in Kentucky, at least 11 counties in Alabama and 1 county in Texas appear to be refusing to issue marriage licenses to anyone.

The position taken by local officials is technically sex-neutral — all couples are denied licenses equally — but critics say the practice specifically marginalizes gays and lesbians.

“The message to straight couples is, ‘We like you and we want to issue you a marriage license, but we can’t because of those darn gay people,'” Scott McCoy, staff attorney of the LGBT Rights Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told BuzzFeed News.

In effect, McCoy said, gay couples become “scapegoats” when couples are forced to drive to the next county, an inconvenience created by government officials.

“The reason they don’t want to issue license at all is because anti-gay bias or a belief in traditional marriage,” McCoy continued. “Otherwise they would be issuing marriage licenses.”

Roger Gannam, who is representing the county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, said issuing these licenses to same-sex couples would violate the conscience of some clerks. The Supreme Court’s ruling did not address a looming question of religious freedom for government employees, he said.

“This case in Kentucky is really the first case,” Gannam, who works for the Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit law firm and self-described Christian ministry, told BuzzFeed News. “It happens to be the first case that tests that issue, so we do hope for a result that finds free exercise rights are not necessarily trumped by the newly announced right to same-sex marriage.”

The push for marriages in all counties, he argued, is not actually a quest to obtain marriage licenses — which couples could get by driving for 30 minutes into another jurisdiction. Gannam contended, rather, “The activist proponents of same-sex marriage want to eliminate all vestiges of dissent.”

On Davis’s behalf, Gannam has appealed the judge’s ruling in Kentucky and sought to have it put on hold — but he did not answer questions from BuzzFeed News about why his client refused to issue licenses while those requests are pending.

Activists, clerks, and local officials are watching that case to see what it could mean for them. In the meantime, BuzzFeed News looked at how marriage equality was being implemented in states like Kentucky and the rest of the country. While in some places it is difficult to precisely ascertain what is happening, here is what we found.

Alabama