http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no7xEmZra…

(Before I found the above clip, I had Googled a 1:00 version --with a 2:30 advertisement (movie preview)!! YT is becoming unsuitable as a meme carousel.)

I lived in Dona Ana County for, well, decades, and I have to admit I'm awfully proud!

Whadda ya wanna bet there's a "Preserve Traditional Marriage" ballot measure being written right now somewhere in NM.

Why are Republican lawmakers always freakin' sticks in the mud and oppose anything even though it doesn't affect them at all?

Despite being a swing state, there are lots of true progressives in New Mexico. They lead on other issues... For example, Santa Fe has had the nation's highest minimum wage for some time now.

Welcome to the Marriage Equality states, New Mexico. Congrats. It shouldn't be much longer before every county in the state complies.

Just to clarify: today's ruling only applied to one county, but there are now three counties where same-sex couples can get married. Last Wednesday, the Dona Ana county clerk went rogue. On Friday, Judge Sarah Singleton ordered the Santa Fe county clerk to issue licenses to same-sex couples. Today, Judge Alan Malott did the same thing in Bernalillo County.

The effect is the same in the end, but out here in New Mexico, it has been a very exciting week. The walls are tumbling down.

What Cait said.

I also think that the State Supreme Court ruling last Thursday upholding the anti-discrimination law does nothing but solidify that equal marriage is going to happen statewide in NM. Especially with the promise of GOP Representatives that they will sue to make these "rogue" courts behave.

Curiously absent from the conversation: Governor Martinez, who is an opponent of marriage equality.

"it's" is a contraction. "its" is the possessive.

Grammar aside, this is good news. It will be followed by a shit storm which will probably be regressive, then court cases and votes will happen and eventually progress will be made.

This doesn't sound like that time in Oregon when they slipped a few marriage licenses in the back door. Saying "We should do it because there's no law forbidding it" sounds legitimate to me.

@12: I think possibly you're being sarcastic? It's true that "we should do it because there's no law against it" is a shaky notion. But "we _could_ do it, because there's no law against it, and moreover we _should_ do it, because, legal issues aside, it's the right thing to do", you have no problem with that, do you? That's where the NM county clerks are at, if I understand correctly.

I wonder what other states have language Easter eggs in their constitutions and charters just waiting on the correct legal challenge to unlock them.

Jesusland loses another one.

Praise the Lord.

It's going to be fun to see the momentum build till there's a few hold-out states...
I'm betting Utah will be the last.

@15 If you want to talk about real "depravity, deviancy and perversion," take a look at what some of your most popular Evangelist preachers are doing to pervert the Gospels and destroy Christianity in the Third World.

There's your real problem. Filthy thieves cloaked in your supposed religious tradition, supported by dimwits like you, raping the goodwill of the world.

If you're ignoring that and worrying about who's in whose (consenting adult) marital bed, you're too deeply fucked up from an ethical, theological and morality standpoint for anyone to care a gnat's spittoonful of what you think.

@10. Possibly hoping this all goes away when she decides she wants to be more than governor of New Mexico.

@17: I can see your reasons for assuming Utah will be last. But when they wanted statehood, suddenly the Prophet tossed out their dogma and traditions about polygamy. In 1978, only a decade after the rest of country started to accept African-Americans as fully human, the LDS church followed suit.

They may be regressive, but they can tell which way the wind is blowing. Their tenets and the new words from on high are consistently whatever is most marketable in the moment. They suffer mightily from having all of their development as a church being within well-documented historic times: pogroms in which they love to play the victim as well as bank fraud, their murders of natives and non-LDS white settlers, etc, that they wish weren't so well documented. As such, to be a faithful Mormon, they've had a lot of practice at selective memory (try to find a LDS member who will accurately recite Church dogma about blacks from the 1970's!).

So when about 62% of the US population is on board, LDS will follow. I'd expect an Alabama, Mississippi, or South Carolina to be the last. (Georgia has Atlanta, LA has New Orleans - the most cosmopolitan cities in the SE). AL, MS and SC have large, conservative, fundie, white populations that are regressive and, with GA, LA, and MD, they have the largest African-American populations which have historically lagged European-Americans in accepting equality for gay citizens.

@12, 13: in 2004 there was no law against SSM in Oregon, and the 1997 Tanner Oregon Supreme Court decision mitigated strongly that SSM should be recognized in Oregon. Even after voters approved Amendment 36 at the polls it was not obvious what should happen to the SSM couples who had married during the window. The district judge upheld the legality of the marriages.

The Oregon SC, in a craven act of cowardice, invalidated these 4000 or so marriages in spring 2005. If the federal courts determine that New Mexico should be issuing SSM licenses, then it raises the interesting possibility that the Oregon SC got it wrong, and that their decision could be appealed in federal court to reinstate these invalidated marriages.

I believe such an appeal would have to be made directly to SCOTUS. They are the only authority who can review state SC decisions. Not that Basic Rights Oregon would have the balls to do it.

@22- as one of those 4000 (really that high?) marriages, I can tell you that it matters not one iota whether Oregon ever gets its collective head out of its ass, as I was married to my partner of 21 years on 12/9/2012 in the great state of Washington, just to the north.
Also, as a result of that 2004 marriage push in Oregon, its citizens then followed suit and wrote discrimination into their constitution that fall.
Washington state was also quick to allow blacks to move north into Washington Territory. Black pioneers were not welcome in Oregon (48 hour 'vagrancy' laws on the books in every city/county in the state), the most racist state west of the Mississippi during the 1800's and most of the 1900's.
Oregon will eventually join CA and WA in marriage equality. For now, it's not much better than GA, LA, SC, MS or AL. Sigh.

I feel bad for all those traditional families that are completely ruined now.

Brian Brown over at NOM is just so upset that county clerks are going against NM state law! That's only allowed in states that already have gay marriage, and then clerks who illegally deny marriage licenses to gay couples are to be commended.

its.

Lovely news !

Percentage-wise, that makes 28% of this country equal in regards to marriage.  We’re still winning.

wrong use of it's vs its, Dan

Confusion over the proper use of "it's" versus "its" is just one of the ways civilization is being destroyed by gay marriage. It's a slippery slope to a complete "your" versus "you're" disaster!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVR…

It really doesn't help that iPhones autocorrect "its" to "it's." That's just dumb.

@23: I was another of the 4000. We remarried three months after our marriage was invalidated, on June 1 2005 in Vancouver CA.

In the 2004 election Oregon had been held out as the one state where we might be able to win the fight over the constitutional state DOMA law, since the LGBT community had defeated a series of antigay ballot initiatives in 1988, 1992, 1994 and 2000. But the tide was too strong that year, and the Oregonian fanned the flames with their puff-cheeked outrage that local officials in Multnomah County had decided there was no valid constitutional reason for denying SSM licenses back in March 2004 - rather like the situation in NM now.

As to the moral superiority and greater enlightenment of WA state: take a look at the county by county results from last November's SSM ballot initiative and see where that gets you, Out in Bumfuck.

There is no benefit to the parties or the public interest in having this matter progress through a lengthy path of litigation while basic constitutional rights are being compromised or denied on a daily basis.

Holy crap, sanity strikes again!

@30 - 5280! Glad to see you here. Wonder where Seandr has got to? What I really wonder, though, is if anyone in Vegas or somewhere else is taking odds on the order of states that will legalize SSM. There could be a big board, with point (date) spreads, hedges on method of legalization (judicial or legislative), and so on. There's money to be made, people!

@33 - I'm sure Nate Silver has already written out that timeline.

@21 My money is on Mississippi being last. Alabama at least has Huntsville, which tends both democrat and progressive.

@33 - In fact, here it is.

@36 Alas, I can't load that page. From my browser, it looks like the Times has taken down their fivethirtyeight blog page. Nate's up with his own website, fivethirtyeight.com, but it seems to be lacking the NYT content.

@37 It's fine now. I'm guessing this was part of the attack that took down the NYT website.