PHOENIX — The final bill is now in for what it cost Arizona taxpayers to fight same-sex marriage: More than a half million dollars.
U.S. District Court Judge John Sedwick on Friday approved an agreement by the Attorney General’s Office to pay $300,000 in legal fees and costs to Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund for its role in the 2014 lawsuit challenging Arizona’s constitutional provision limiting marriage to one man and one woman. The state also will reimburse the group for more than $2,000 in costs.
That comes on top of another $200,000 in legal fees the state already has paid to attorney Shawn Aiken, who had filed his own challenge to the ban.
Attorney Jenny Pizer of Lambda Legal suggested the state is getting off easy.
“This reflects, among other things, the quality and efficiency of our work and resulting reasonableness of the hourly rates charged,” she said.
And Pizer said the fees also represent not only the work in getting Sedwick to void the Arizona restriction but a separate, earlier case.
That involved a successful bid on behalf of Green Valley residents Fred McQuire and George Martinez, who wed in California after that state recognized same-sex marriages.
After Martinez died in Arizona, this state Department of Health Services would not issue a death certificate recognizing McQuire as his legal spouse. Sedwick directed the agency to process the request.
That ruling in September 2014 paved the way for the same judge the following month to strike down entirely the prohibition against gay nuptials.
The state appealed. But all that became moot when the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently struck down similar laws in other states, concluding gays have the same constitutional right to marry as heterosexual couples.
Pizer said that other legal fights may remain.
For example, she said litigation may be necessary to deal with various laws on survivor benefits, property ownership and even divorce, all statutes that predate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
“I am hopeful, though, that we will not be seeing discrimination by official state or municipal policy,” Pizer said.
One thing that apparently won’t become an issue involves adoptions. Arizona law still spells out that, everything else being equal, preference is supposed to be given to a married man and married woman.
But Pizer pointed out that Gov. Doug Ducey, an adoptee himself, formally overturned a policy of the Department of Child Safety, which has refused to certify legally married gay couples for adoption or permit them to jointly be foster parents.
She said, though, if that were to change, perhaps with a new administration, Lambda Legal would take the issue to court.
