Kendall Porter called the Pulaski County Courthouse before she and her girlfriend began the nearly three-hour trip to the capital city to get married May 16.
The clerks delivered the news: As of that day, they could no longer issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. About the same time, Porter got a message from the pastor who planned to meet them in Little Rock to marry them, bearing the same news.
For a week in Arkansas, clerks in some counties -- in on-again, off-again fashion -- issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples. On May 16, the state Supreme Court issued a stay, halting clerks offices from issuing licenses to gay couples.
"It's like dangling a carrot in front of a horse, but not letting them have it," Porter said. "I felt unequal. I felt like my rights as a human being were being taken away."
Porter, 28, and her girlfriend Danielle Prewett, 26 -- both of Booneville -- took a week to talk out what they planned to do next.
Like hundreds of others before them, they plan now to head to Eureka Springs where they can sign a domestic-partners registry. In December, they will hold a ceremony, hoping that by then gay marriage will be legal in Arkansas and it will be a wedding ceremony, she said.
Eureka Springs is the only city in the state that offers a domestic-partners registry for unmarried couples -- heterosexual and homosexual.
Cities and counties in 24 other states -- including Texas and Iowa -- also offer domestic-partner registries, according to the Human Rights Campaign website.
The registry has been available in Eureka Springs since 2007, and 778 couples are listed on it, City Clerk Ann Armstrong said. About 95 percent of the registrants are gay couples, and the majority are from Arkansas, she said.
To get on the registry, the clerk's office requires an identification card, she said, and applicants must pay $35 for a certified copy of the document. The state doesn't legally recognize the document, she added.
But, by having the certification, some employers may allow the couples to get on each other's health insurance plans, Armstrong said. Almost any car-insurance provider in the nation allows domestic partners to be insured at family rates, but the "most valuable aspect" is that more medical providers are starting to recognize the relationship, she said.
The registry doesn't carry the same weight as a marriage license or a medical power of attorney, she said.
There are some 1,300 federal rights and benefits associated with marriage, Human Rights spokesman Fred Sainz has said.
"The thing is that [the registry] was a step toward marriage equality," Armstrong said. "By taking that first step and letting the idea become normal, then we could take the next step and move it forward just a little bit in our collective evolution: It was meant as kind of the planting of the seed."
Only about five couples have registered on it since May 16, when the state's highest court suspended Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza's order that found the state's constitutional and statutory bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.
Piazza issued his initial ruling late on May 9, a Friday. The next morning, same-sex couples were lined up in front of the Carroll County Courthouse in Eureka Springs -- the only county clerk's office open on Saturdays -- to become the first in the state to receive marriage licenses. Several held weddings that day.
The following Monday, same-sex couples also flocked to other counties that were issuing licenses. About 600 same-sex couples were married in that six days that licenses were issued in the state.
For Destiny Burden, the Supreme Court's stay was heartbreaking.
While Burden, 22, was able to marry May 14, many of her friends could not by that Friday, she said.
Two months before their marriage, Burden and her wife, Lori Burden, 34, had registered as domestic partners in Eureka Springs. The Jacksonville couple had taken off work, booked a hotel room in Eureka Springs and driven there to sign up.
Destiny Burden said the clerk in Eureka Springs treated their registration as seriously as Burden would have expected if they were applying for a marriage license.
"We did the closest thing we could get," she said. It was "just one way that we can show we have something."
Porter is still crossing her fingers that the Supreme Court's stay will be lifted.
"It's really unfair," she said. "There's a lot more benefits that come with marriage. It's not just a piece of paper."
The matter is very personal for Porter. Her mother was dying in a hospital and the mother's girlfriend wasn't allowed to visit her. Porter added that the family wouldn't allow the mother's girlfriend to attend the funeral, either.
Porter and Prewett had previously considered registering as domestic partners, and recently decided to go ahead and do it.
"It's not a fallback," Porter said of the registry. "Regardless of whether or not [gay] marriage is legal [in December], it's a celebration of our love for each other," she said. "The paperwork may be a little bit different, but our love is the same."
A section on 05/25/2014