Bisbee, Arizona To Begin Issuing Civil Union Licenses Because They Can

Bisbee’s location in Southern Arizona

A tiny town on the southern border of Arizona has decided to grant civil unions to same-sex couples. The local city council of Bisbee has collectively stopped agreeing with Arizona’s notoriously conservative political climate, and declared that they’re going to start making their own rules about civil unions.

Arizona has a state law banning same-sex marriage, but the law only uses the word marriage, and this is the loophole Bisbee is hoping to exploit. City Councilman Ken Budge said, “While gay marriage is banned in Arizona, there’s no laws on the books in Arizona about civil unions.” Bisbee is attempting to navigate around the law at the state level by using different words for the same thing.

Downtown Bisbee, Arizona

Bisbee is a small town with a population of around 6,000 residents. Originally founded as a mining town, it is now a thriving artistic community billed as a “quirky” mountain town, perfect for retirees. Basically, a whole lot of hippies and artists moved there in the 1970s and things have been awesome ever since. Also, this place is gorgeous.

“I’m almost ashamed that I didn’t think of it earlier. To me it’s a civil rights issue,” Mayor Adriana Badal said. She also said that the civil unions law will be more of a symbolic statement than anything else, with the ability to only enforce the law within the city limits.

Mark Handley and his boyfriend, Hywel Logan, own a local toy shop in Bisbee.
via {Fronteras Desk}

Local resident Mark Handley, who owns a downtown toy shop with his partner of over ten years, said, “There’s sort of a limited amount that the city can do. It’s as much as they can do and it’s only in the Bisbee city limits. But it’s something.” He and his partner have already signed up for the $76 civil union certificate. When passed, the law will go into effect on May 2nd.

Bisbee’s civil unions will allow same-sex couples to register as partners to receive benefits, and at a basic level,

couples who sign into a union will be considered family members. Hospital visits, benefits for partners of Bisbee city employees and some property ownership rights, even family passes at the city pool, would all be a lot easier under this ordinance.

Bisbee’s local Episcopal church has agreed to perform the civil union ceremonies.

This is a move reminiscent of San Francisco circa 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Struck by the homophobic remarks in Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address (the one where Bush declared America should outlaw same-sex marriage with a constitutional amendment), Mayor Newsom set the wheels in motion to allow San Francisco’s city clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This lasted from February 12 to March 11 before being halted by the California Supreme Court. All of the 4,000 distributed licenses were voided in an August 2004 court decision. These nullified marriages led to the 2008 “In re Marriage Cases” ruling by the California Supreme Court, where the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage before Prop 8 came and ruined everything.

Perhaps Bisbee won’t get the same kind of reaction from Arizona, due to the stark contrast between 2004 San Francisco and 2013 Bisbee, but it does remind us that civil disobedience has a long history with our community and with the issue of marriage in particular. San Francisco’s decision to circumvent Californian law set a lot of wheels in motion for longterm marriage equality not only in California, but nationwide with the Prop 8 and DOMA Supreme Court trials. Civil disobedience works for our community because we’re already disobeying laws just by being ourselves — queer couples have already been marrying each other (if not officially) long before marriage was legal anywhere, and loving each other when sodomy laws were still on the books (and in the places where those laws still exist). It works for our community to defy those laws in the process of changing them. Bisbee, Arizona has recognized that it’s time for a change, and it seems only appropriate for that change to be as queer as our community.