Five days after same-sex marriages became legal in North Carolina, a federal judge the Honorable U.S. District Judge William Osteen Jr in Greensboro granted Republican legislators the ability to intervene for the limited purposes of appeal.
Questions about the effect of the ruling are rampart.
Phil Berger, president pro tem of the N.C. Senate, and Thom Tillis, speaker of the N.C. House, want to use tax dollars to appeal against the higher court’s decision.
N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper said he no longer would defend the 2012 voter-approved ban based on the ruling.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a Virginia ban on same-sex marriages. The attorneys involved in the North Carolina cases had agreed months earlier that Virginia’s ban was legally indistinguishable from North Carolina’s Amendment One.