Guess How Much Fighting Same-Sex Marriage Just Cost The State Of Michigan?

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and his GOP Attorney General, Bill Schuette, fought same-sex marriage all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and were just forced to pay the bill.

For years, the women who today are April and Jayne DeBoer-Rowse fought the State of Michigan for the right to marry, because they wanted to jointly adopt their children. Both women are pediatric nurses and each had adopted one or two of their three children, some of whom have special needs. (Today, they have four children.) In fact, originally they filed suit against Michigan not for the right to marry, merely for the right to co-adopt, in case something happened and one or the other parent wasn’t legally recognized.

Every step of the way, Gov. Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette fought them. When they won their federal case, Snyder and Schuette appealed to the 6th Circuit, and that’s where April and Jayne lost, creating a constitutional crisis that forced the case to the Supreme Court. 

April and Jayne and couples from three other states finally won in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Along the way, Schuette’s battle against them and same-sex marriage was atrocious.

One of Schuette’s expert witnesses, a professor who has ties to NOM, told the court he believes gay people are going to hell.

Schuette also offered up Mark Regnerus, author of a massively discredited “study” that falsely claimed to find children raised by same-sex parents grow up with a host of problems not seen by their peers raised by different-sex couples. The judge tossed his testimony out.

Gov. Snyder along the way decided that 322 couples who had been legally married after the first case was won, no longer were and his government would “suspend” and not recognize their marriages. AG Schuette even said at one point those marriages “never existed.”

And finally, the bill has come due.

Thanks to Gov. Snyder and AG Schuette, the taxpayers of the state of Michigan just paid $1.9 million in attorney fees.

Money that never should have had to have been spent in the first place.

Dana Nessel and Carole Stanyar are the attorneys who worked tirelessly on the case.

“Four years without a paycheck, fronting costs in a case of this magnitude, was certainly hard on our families,” Stanyar told the Detroit News. “The fee statute was enacted to empower and encourage the vindication of civil rights. I do feel empowered, and very encouraged. So I guess the law is working as Congress intended.”

“If our case motivates younger lawyers to stand up for people, do the right the thing, that would be great,” Stanyar says.

April and Jayne married in August. Here’s video:

 

Image: Screenshot via WXYZ-TV Detroit/YouTube