At some point, stories like this will cease to be news.
It took two Tarrant County women nearly two years to legally end their failed marriage because of the tangle of state and federal law.
But on Thursday, Brooke Powell and Cori Jo Long were finally divorced after a five-minute hearing before state District Judge William Harris.
Court officials said they believe it is the first same-sex divorce in Tarrant County and one of the few in Texas.
“It’s been a roller coaster,” Long said after her courtroom appearance. “Honestly, I didn’t think it would happen.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling June 26 that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage is what prodded Tarrant County judges to grant the divorce.
But don’t expect the first divorce to open the floodgates, legal experts say. Although the Supreme Court’s decision led to a rush of same-sex weddings, that won’t happen with divorces. They are not as simple as reprinting the marriage license form.
Powell and Long married in New Hampshire in 2010. Four years later, one woman filed for divorce while the other asked Texas to act as though the marriage never took place.
But Harris closed off both options, and the women appealed their case to the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth.
“It was a feeling, initially, of being invisible,” Powell said. “There was no resolution. But I always had faith in the legal system that this day would come.”
Citing the Supreme Court ruling, the appeals court sent the case back to Harris. This time, he granted a divorce.
There was also a Texas Supreme Court ruling, which preceded the SCOTUS ruling, in a case about a same-sex couple in Travis County. As such, this case was pretty clear cut. However, as the story notes, there was no property to divide, and there were no children in the marriage so no custody issues to settle. Will the courts be able to apply existing law in an equitable manner for future same-sex divorce cases, or will it become clear that the Legislature will need to address this? I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the latter, so we’ll have to see how it goes when such a case does appear. The simple dissolution of a marriage, at least, is something that can be done.
Obergefell substantially simplifies divorce law regarding same-sex couples in Texas. Before that decision, there was a huge open question as to how courts should handle the separation of same-sex couples who were legally married in another state. Now it’s easy—they’re married, and it’s handled like any other divorce case.