When Yolanda Daniel and Jo Ann Martinez marched into the Merced County courthouse asking for a marriage license on the morning of January 16, 1976, local bureaucrats had no idea what to do. Although those in the office had never been asked to license a same-sex couple, California did not explicitly ban gay marriage. The law defined marriage as simply a union between “two persons.”
The county clerk’s office referred the matter up the chain of command. But the official tasked with issuing a final decision on marriage cases, a lawyer for Merced County named Russell Koch, was out of town that week. The clerk’s office placed a series of phone calls to legal minds across the county asking how to proceed. According to Dave Bultena, a lawyer who worked for Merced at the time, a representative for the vacationing county counsel rushed into the district attorney’s office later that morning “all in a huff, kind of upset,” and asked the district attorney to weigh in. “He was working up a sweat,” Bultena said. The district attorney told the man that he didn’t know what to do, either. Perhaps because of the conservatism of Merced County, few had ever given any thought to the possibility of same-sex marriage.
By the afternoon, the Superior Court judge for Merced received the last of these calls. He told the clerk’s office that neither he nor other attorneys in his office knew of a statute against same-sex marriage. The judge suggested that the clerk issue Daniel and Martinez the license.
Within the hour, the two women stood outside the county courthouse as Judge Haven Courtney—a justice of the peace—officiated their marriage ceremony. When the judge told them, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Yolanda Daniel and Jo Ann Martinez, surrounded by half a dozen friends and a photographer for the local paper, leaned in and kissed.
In reality, there was precedent to suggest that gay marriage violated California law. In June 1970, the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church filed a lawsuit on behalf of a lesbian couple after Los Angeles County refused to issue them a marriage license, arguing that the move violated the state’s constitution. The case was quickly dismissed. And in the 1972 case Baker v. Nelson, in which a couple sued the state of Minnesota for infringement of their civil rights, the Supreme Court ruled that state bans on same-sex marriage were constitutional.