Washington DC is the sixth jurisdiction after Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont to issue same-sex licences.
According to The Washington Post, 151 couples lined up to apply for marriage licenses on the fourth floor of the D.C. Superior Court by the end of Wednesday. The earliest many couples will be able to marry is Tuesday, due to a processing period of three business days for all licence applicants.
"Advocates employed an incremental strategy, quietly stacking up rights and responsibilities for same-sex couples to avoid soliciting an outcry from Congress. When the time was right, moving from domestic partnerships to marriage would not be a "big leap, just the next logical step," said Richard J. Rosendall, a former president of Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C.
"The go-slow approach was shaped by experience. For a decade, Congress blocked funding to implement the city's domestic partnership law passed in 1992, allowing it to take effect in 2002. Likewise for the sodomy ban, repealed by the council in 1981 but overturned by Congress and not ended until 1993," the Post reported.
While proponents of same-sex marriage are celebrating the culmination of a more than three-decade fight, some other groups such as the Catholic Charities of Washington, D.C. have sprung into action. On Monday, the organisation informed its employees that henceforth, new hires and yet unwed employees would not be entitled to spousal health benefits - no matter if they were in a same-sex or opposite sex marriage.
In the memo, Catholic Charities president and CEO Edward Orzechowski explained that, "As of March 2 ... the new plan will provide the same level of coverage for employees and their dependents that you now have, with one exception: spouses not in the plan as of March 1, will not be eligible for coverage in the future ... We sincerely regret that we have to make this change, but it is necessary to allow Catholic Charities to continue to provide essential services to the clients we serve in partnership with the District of Columbia while remaining consistent with the tenets of our religious faith."
Last month, the same organisation withdrew its foster care service rather than "risk" having its kids go into homes with same-sex couples.
Update (Mar 5, 2010):
On the same day (Mar 4), two men were married in Buenos Aires - Argentina's second same-sex marriage, after a judge approved the union ahead of possible legislation in Argentina. The US-based Catholic News Agency noted that "their ceremony took place Wednesday despite requests from the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the Corporation of Catholic Lawyers that the city's mayor appeal the decision allowing the 'marriage.'"
On Thursday, a law allowing same-sex weddings took effect in Mexico City, making the huge and overwhelmingly Catholic megalopolis the first territory anywhere in Latin America to put same-sex couples on the same standing as heterosexuals. The law, passed in December and effective Thursday, applies only to the capital, a city of 10 million.
The Wall Street Journal online reports: "The changes were hailed by gay-rights advocates as a major event in Latin America. But they also set a new culture war afoot in Mexico, one of the region's most conservative countries. The new marriage and adoption laws have drawn fire from many of Mexico's top names, from conservative President Felipe Calderón, who supports a constitutional challenge to the law, to the Mexican Catholic Cardinal Norberto Rivera, who recently called the law a 'violation against children' that 'respects neither culture nor nationality.'"