Filed under: state law
The Cherokee Nation decided to recognize a gay marriage between two of its members:
The top court of the Cherokee Nation has declined to strike down a gay marriage in what is seen as a pioneering case in American Indian country, the couple and officials said on Wednesday.
Cherokee tribal members Kathy Reynolds, 29, and Dawn McKinley, 34, married in May 2004 in Oklahoma, just weeks after the city of San Francisco ignited a national debate on gay marriage by briefly allowing same-sex couples to wed.
Gay rights advocates say the pair are the first registered same-sex marriage in Indian country.
…
The lawyer for the Tribal Council, Todd Hembree, said the tribe would no longer fight the marriage. “As far as the Tribal Council is concerned, that is the end of the legal proceeding,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.
He said it was also possible that the U.S. government would have to recognize the marriage because of the sovereign status of Indian tribes, which could, in theory at least, make them eligible for federal tax benefits denied to date to gay couples.
Lena Ayoub, an attorney who represented Reynolds and McKinley, said the federal government has not recognized any same-sex state marriages to date and called the federal obligation to recognize sovereign tribal marriage “a very complicated area of the law.”
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