'Bride' and 'Groom' being Restored to California Marriage Forms
Mercury News
By Ken McLaughlin
October 6, 2008

"Do you, Party A, take this Party B to be your lawfully wedded spouse ...''

Nah. Never did sound right. So the state of California is now changing the way people can identify themselves on its new gender-neutral marriage licenses.

Now the bride and groom can choose to be called, well, the "bride" and "groom."

Or, for that matter, the bride and bride. Or the groom and groom.

Since June 16, when gay marriage became legal in California as the result of a state Supreme Court ruling, two people getting hitched had only one option when filling out their marriage license form. One had to be identified as Party A. The other had to be known as Party B.

"Following the Supreme Court decision in May, we moved quickly to make that change to be consistent with the ruling,'' said Suanne Buggy, spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health, which oversees marriage licenses.

Perhaps too quickly.

Many Californians, even those who support the right of gays to marry, thought "Party A, Party B'' sounded too cold, too bureaucratic.

Santa Clara County Clerk-Recorder Regina Alcomendras said Monday that she's heard few complaints from people obtaining marriage licenses since the gender-neutral form took effect. But Alcomendras said county clerks in rural counties have received a lot more flak.

One Roseville couple refused to sign their marriage license because the form didn't say "bride'' and "groom.'' And last week Advertisement ADVERTISEMENT the couple filed a lawsuit against the Placer County clerk in Superior Court.

"We've been hearing from a lot of average Californians that they would like to have the bride-groom option,'' Buggy said.

Or they can simply choose to be known only as "First person'' and "Second person.''

In any case: No more Party A, Party B.

County clerks will begin using the newest marriage-license form on Nov. 17.

That's 13 days after Californians decide whether to keep gay marriage legal when they vote on Proposition 8, which seeks to overturn the Supreme Court's decision.

New research released Monday from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that an estimated 11,000 same-sex couples got married in California in the first three months since it became legal. It's not known how many couples were from out of state.

San Francisco is currently the only county in the state that tracks the gender of people getting married. So researchers calculated the number of gay marriages by assuming that the increases in the number of licenses from year to year were largely attributed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, said Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute who wrote the University of California-Los Angeles study.

According to the researchers' estimates, five counties accounted for nearly 80 percent of the same-sex marriages: Los Angeles (2,719), San Francisco (2,708), San Diego (1,689), Riverside (1,237) and Alameda (475).

Santa Clara County had 265. Santa Cruz County had 138. San Mateo County had 350.

Gates said about 5,000 gay marriages were performed within the first week after it became legal.

The new marriage form should make it easier for researchers to get a more precise count of gay marriages, Gates said.

"But that will depend on the degree that people choose the bride-groom option,'' he said. "That's the unknown.''

In any case, Gates said, California seems to be negotiating the brave new world of same-sex marriage with more sensitivity and bureaucratic efficiency than the city of Toronto.

When gay marriage became legal in the Canadian province of Ontario five years ago, "Toronto didn't have time to change the form, so same-sex couples had to choose which one would be the bride, which one would be the groom.''