Big change is coming to the lives of the lesbian couple at the center of the fight for same-sex marriage in California no matter how the Supreme Court decides their case.
After 13 years of raising four boys together, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier are about to be empty nesters. Their youngest two children, 18-year-old twins, will graduate from high school in June and head off to college a couple of months later.
“We’ll see all the movies, get theater season tickets because you can actually go,” Stier said in the living room of their bungalow in Berkeley. Life will not revolve quite so much around food, and the challenge of putting enough of it on the table to feed teenagers.
They might also get married, if the high court case goes their way.
Perry, 48, and Stier, 50, set aside their lunch hour on a recent busy Friday to talk to The Associated Press about their Supreme Court case, the evolution of their activism for gay rights and family life.
On Tuesday, they plan to be in the courtroom when their lawyer, Theodore Olson, tries to persuade the justices to strike down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriages and to declare that gay couples can marry nationwide. Supporters of California’s Proposition 8, represented by lawyer Charles Cooper, argue that the court should not override the democratic process and impose a judicial solution that would redefine marriage in the 40 states that do not allow same-sex couples to wed.
A second case, set for Wednesday, involves the part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that prevents same-sex couples who are legally married from receiving a range of federal tax, pension and other benefits that otherwise are available to married people.
The Supreme Court hearing is the moment Perry and Stier, along with Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrillo of Burbank, have been waiting for since they agreed four years ago to be the named plaintiffs and public faces of a well-funded, high-profile effort to challenge Proposition 8 in the courts.
“For the past four years, we’ve lived our lives in this hurry-up-and-wait, pins-and-needles way,” Perry said, recalling the crush of court deadlines and the seemingly endless wait for rulings from a federal district judge, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, also based there, and the California Supreme Court.
Stier said Olson told them the case could take several years to resolve. “I thought, years?” she said.
But the couple has been riding a marriage rollercoaster since 2003, when Perry first asked Stier to marry her. They were planning a symbolic, but not legally recognized, wedding when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004. So they were married, but only briefly. Six months later, the state Supreme Court invalidated the same-sex unions.
They went ahead with their plans anyway, but “it was one of the sadder points of our wedding,” Perry said.
Less than four years later, however, the same state court overturned California’s prohibition on same-sex unions. Then, on the same …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox US News
The gay marriage debate moves to the 
