Lawsuit Filed to Overturn Pennsylvania’s Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

Deb and Susan Whitewood are one of the first couples to challenge Pennsylvania's archaic marriage laws.

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The New York Times is reporting that Pennsylvania lesbian couple Deb and Susan Whitewood are among a handful of plaintiffs to file a lawsuit to overturn the our state’s ban on gay marriage, citing the Supreme Court’s recent majority decision that the law denies them a “status of immense import” and that it deprives their two teenage children of “the integrity and closeness of their own family.”

The suit was filed in federal court in Harrisburg this morning with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, who, according to The New York Times, says the move is especially important in Pennsylvania, “because overturning the state’s gay marriage ban in the Republican-controlled legislature is a near-term impossibility.”

It was only a matter of time after SCOTUS decided to strike down DOMA that lawsuits of this nature would start rolling out, and let’s hope to God it helps. NYT reports that the ACLU plans to file suit in two other states, Virginia and North Carolina, and that movements are happening all over the country to grow the country’s gay-marriage-support system before the issue gets back to the Supreme Court in, according to National Director of the LGBT Project at the ACLU James Esseks, “the next several years.”

Read the rest of the New York Times article here.

Read a piece on the lawsuit by LGBTQ Nation here.

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