San Diego Clerk Begs Court to Stop Marriage Equality

A county clerk in San Diego, Calif., asked the state Supreme Court to halt the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples Friday, the latest in a series of efforts from conservatives to invalidate the recent ruling striking down the state's ban on marriage equality, Proposition 8.

Same-sex couples began marrying in California on June 28, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Prop. 8 on a technicality, deciding that the official ballot proponents who defended the law in court had no legal standing to do so.

Ernest J. Dronenburg, Jr., filed a petition with the California Supreme Court, asking it to order county clerks statewide to stop marrying gay and lesbian Californians until a pending legal challenge is resolved, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Dronenburg claimed that the legal requirement to marry same-sex couples is causing him to "suffer irreparable injury and damage." As such, Dronenburg argued, the court should halt all same-sex marriages in the state while it considers a petition from the original proponents of Proposition 8, a group called ProtectMarriage, which alleges that the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in favor of marriage equality on June 26 should apply only to the two counties where the four plaintiffs reside -- Los Angeles and Alameda.

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Attorney General Kamala Harris responded to the petition on Friday, flatly rejecting Dronenberg's arguments. "The filing offers no new arguments that could deny same-sex couples their constitutionally protected civil rights," wrote Harris. "The federal injunction is still in effect, and it requires all 58 counties to perform same-sex marriages. No exceptions."

Similar petitions from antigay supporters of the unconstitutional law have tried to stall the implementation of the high court's ruling re-establishing marriage equality in California but have been rejected by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court in recent weeks.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said the new appeal was made to the U.S. Supreme Court instead of the California Supreme Court.