Lesbian couples fight for family values in Mississippi

Richard Wolf | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Mississippi couple fights gay marriage ban The same-sex marriage movement is alive and well even in Mississippi. Andrea Sanders and Rebecca Bickett are one of two lesbian couples fighting to overturn the state's gay marriage ban.

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — When the subject of same-sex marriage was broached in Becky Bickett's business law class in September, her professor predicted it would take at least another five to seven years for the nation's most conservative state to legalize the practice.

For one thing, he said, no one was challenging the state's gay marriage ban head-on.

By October, that had changed. Bickett and her partner, Andrea Sanders, joined Joce (Jo-see) Pritchett and Carla Webb in a long-shot lawsuit against Mississippi's 10-year-old prohibition. One month later, they had prevailed in federal district court. On Friday they will take their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans.

Same-sex marriage has spread like wildfire through 35 states in the past decade. The Supreme Court will consider this month whether to decide the issue on a national basis. Cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana are teed up for the high court's consideration.

But nowhere is progress toward marriage equality more unlikely than in Mississippi, which passed its gay marriage ban in 2004 with 86% support — the largest margin of any state. More than six in 10 residents classify themselves as "very religious" in Gallup polling, making it the nation's most-religious state as well.

So delicate is the issue here in the Deep South that the first television ad sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading gay rights organization, featured a Bible study teacher who didn't urge support for gay marriage, merely tolerance. It was labeled "All God's Children."

"It's like a 12-step program for gay marriage in Mississippi," Bickett says. "Let's just 'tolerate' us and quit throwing stones. We'll move on from there."

The state's conservative values work both ways. Among same-sex couples, 26% are raising children, also tops in the nation, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. In a state with only one abortion clinic, that makes gay marriage a family-values issue.

Bickett, 34, and Sanders, 32, are raising Adrian and Owen, 17-month-old twin boys, who Bickett adopted at birth. Pritchett, 47, and Webb, 39, who live in the Jackson area, shared in the births of 6-year-old Grace and 2-year-old Ethan: Webb supplied the eggs, Pritchett the womb.

Yet when Grace realized the couple wasn't married, "she was mortified," Pritchett says.

"She said, 'I thought you were supposed to get married before you have children,'" Webb recalls.

'GETTING OUT OF DODGE'

That's certainly what a majority of Mississippians believe, says Tim Wildmon, president of the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association. They also believe marriage should be between a man and a woman, he says, though not by the same 86% majority.

But Wildmon, whose organization has led the opposition to same-sex marriage here, says it's wrong to portray the state's residents as bigoted and intolerant.

"The moral values that most Mississippians have adopted come from the teachings in the Scriptures. That's how they were raised," he says. "But that same Bible teaches you to be kind to people. We're probably more caring, more loving and more accepting than a lot of other places."

That's not the way District Judge Carlton Reeves saw it in his ruling last year. "Seven centuries of strong objections to homosexual conduct have resulted in a constellation of state laws that treat gay and lesbian Mississippians as lesser, 'other' people," he said. "Thus, it is easy to conclude that they have suffered through a long and unfortunate history of discrimination."

Pritchett and Webb, in fact, had gotten to the point that they were considering a move to another state. Webb, an endodontist with her own practice, had a job interview in Maine last year. Pritchett, a self-employed civil engineer with her own company, went along. While in Maine, they got hitched.

"I was hating living in Mississippi," Webb says. "Here, people think gay marriage is not only not all right, they think it's perverted."

"We were getting the hell out of Dodge," Pritchett says.

Instead, they were drawn to stay and fight to have their marriage recognized in their home state. Pritchett got involved in the battle against the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which critics feared would allow commercial businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples.

From there, it wasn't so much of a leap to join the Campaign for Southern Equality in its lawsuit. They were represented in court by Roberta Kaplan, who won the Supreme Court case against the federal Defense of Marriage Act in 2013.

Once their names and photos were in the newspapers and on TV, Pritchett and Webb expected a negative reaction from neighbors and associates.

"I was really worried that people would cancel their appointments the day after the lawsuit was announced," Webb says. "I've been more shocked at how supportive people have been."

'A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY'

Bickett and Sanders have it harder because of their economic circumstances. They were literally thrown together after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their parents' Gulf Coast homes in Bay St. Louis in 2005. Their first home together was a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer.

Now the couple owns a single-wide trailer on three acres north of the coast, but they are struggling financially. Bickett was laid off from her job as a geospatial analyst and is looking for full-time work. Sanders, with a degree in family relations and human development, is staying home with the toddlers.

They dream of having a big family, but without legalized gay marriage, Sanders isn't considered to be Owen's and Adrian's mom. They cannot adopt or even be foster parents as a couple.

"If something happened to Becky, I have no legal rights over these babies," Sanders says. "I want my children to have two legal parents. Why shouldn't they?"

Ironically, both women's heterosexual sisters are going through divorces, while Bickett and Sanders can't get married. For the time being, they are settling for what the Human Rights Campaign is seeking throughout the South: Tolerance.

"We haven't experienced any hatred," Sanders says. "'You've got a beautiful family' — that's what we hear a lot."