Same-sex couples in Yolo County anxious to tie the knot now that Proposition 8 is no longer the law of the land may want to plan for a late-summer, early-fall wedding just to be safe.

That’s when legal experts estimate counties will be able to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, though Yolo County Clerk-Recorder Freddie Oakley is more optimistic.

“I think it will be faster than that,” she said Wednesday morning.

Just hours earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for same-sex marriages in California by holding that defenders of Proposition 8 — California’s ban on gay marriage — lacked standing to appeal a lower court’s ruling striking down the initiative as unconstitutional.

The court’s ruling will be finalized in about a month, after which the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will have to lift its stay on U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s 2010 ruling that Proposition 8 violated the constitution.

Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that as soon as that stay is lifted, he will order the state Department of Public Health to advise counties that they must begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

For those who have been waiting years, that day can’t come soon enough.

Oakley’s office was already getting calls Wednesday morning from couples hoping to tie the knot. She’s advising them to call back later.

“Wait and call us back when things are moving again,” she said.

Oakley said that while other jurisdictions, including the city and county of San Francisco, are predicting marriages could resume in mid-July, she thinks it will be sooner, adding, “We will be happy to start scheduling and performing weddings as soon as we get the high sign from the California Department of Public Health.”

“We’re excited and happy,” she said.

It won’t be the first time Oakley has presided over same-sex marriages — her office performed dozens during the brief window when such marriages were legal in 2008. That was the period between the California Supreme Court’s ruling in June that a ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional and the enactment of Proposition 8 by voters in November.

The court later ruled that all same-sex marriages performed during that period remained valid even after Proposition 8 was enacted.

Davis residents Shelly Bailes and Ellen Pontac were the very first same-sex couple Oakley married in 2008. They had actually gotten married before — in San Francisco in 2004 when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom began performing same-sex marriages. But those 4,000 marriages were invalidated by the state Supreme Court.

The couple have fought for gay rights locally and nationally for years and were thrilled with news of Wednesday’s high court ruling.

“Discrimination has lost, bigotry has lost and love has won. That’s the way it should be,” Bailes told the Enterprise.

Another local couple, Susan Leonardi and Rebecca Pope, did not take advantage of that window in 2008, mainly because “we didn’t think it would be that short-lived,” Leonardi said.

And without federal benefits to go along with the marriage, they didn’t see the point, she added.

Now however, they need to get married in order for Pope to remain on Leonardi’s health insurance. Leonardi receives her benefits through the state of Maryland, where gay marriage is legal and, in fact, required if Pope is to be on Leonardi’s insurance. The couple expected to spend part of their summer in another state where same-sex marriage is legal, doing exactly that.

Instead, they’ll get to marry in California.

Leonardi and Pope have been together for 29 years, with four children and seven grandchildren in the mix, so tying the knot won’t make any big difference in their relationship, only in the practical sense.

Still, Pope said she was “moved by how deeply I feel about it today.”

They’ve been hearing from family and friends all over the country expressing their joy for them.

“We’re really excited,” Leonardi said. “We didn’t expect it in our lifetime.”

Now the pair has to decide where and when to marry — Leonardi said they’re torn between going to San Francisco for historic reasons and staying in Yolo County, where Oakley “has been such a great friend” to the gay and lesbian community.

And while Oakley has always been a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage, other elected county clerks may not be, throwing a possible wrinkle into what comes next, according to UC Davis law professor and associate dean Vikram Amar.

Amar said Wednesday that he expects county clerks will be cleared to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses in late July or early August, but that some county clerks may argue Walker’s ruling does not apply to them — only to the original counties involved in the case.

Proponents of Proposition 8 might even apply political pressure to elected county clerks to keep them from issuing licenses, he said.

However, Attorney General Kamala Harris said Wednesday afternoon that all 58 counties must follow Walker’s order and the state will take legal action against any county that doesn’t.

Other than that, there are few other routes for proponents of Proposition 8, Amar said.

Practically speaking — and legally — “there’s nowhere else to go… there are no bullets left in the chamber,” he said.

Amar, who was one of the first legal scholars to argue that Proposition 8 proponents lacked legal standing to defend the measure in federal court, said the case leaves open the question of what this all means for California’s initiative process in general.

If, in the future, voters pass an initiative which is then challenged in court, and the state refuses to defend it (as happened with Proposition 8), presumably no citizens would have standing to defend the initiative under the terms of Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling.

It may be that in the future, authors of an initiative will have to explicitly state in the wording that if the state chooses not to defend the measure in court, the authors would have standing to do so.

“That’s unclear,” Amar said.

— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at [email protected] or 530-747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy

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Davis residents Shelley Bailes and Ellen Pontac cheer during a rally on the steps of the Capitol in support of the Supreme Courts ruling on Prop. 8 and DOMA. Fred Gladdis/Enterprise photo

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Jacob Zembower and Rozie Beverly, both of Sacramento, cheer during a rally on the steps of the Capitol in support of the Supreme Courts ruling on Prop. 8 and DOMA. Fred Gladdis/Enterprise photo

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