The Idaho Association of Counties convened county clerks from across the state in a webinar this afternoon to go over procedures to comply with the federal court decision this week legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. Just before the session started, the news came that the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals had issued a temporary stay, delaying the change, which had been scheduled to take effect Friday morning at 9. “They were pretty well ready,” said Dan Chadwick, IAC executive director. “Now we’ve been given a little bit of breathing room and we can fine-tune it a little bit more.”

The main change needed is to forms for marriage licenses, which now identify “bride” and “groom.” “The question is do you use bride-bride, groom-groom, spouse, person – there are a number of different opinions out there, and all of them are correct,” Chadwick said. “Part of the discussion was to make sure that the marriage license itself ends up in a format that is a family keepsake, because it is.”

He said, “We have given ourselves a deadline of Tuesday of next week to finalize the forms, because we don’t know what the courts are going to do. What we want to do is be ready if the stay is lifted and the injunction goes into effect, and we’re pretty close.”

The county clerks conferred with Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and representatives of the state’s bureau of vital statistics at the webinar, Chadwick said. “We had over 50 participants on the webinar. My guess is we had pretty close to every county participating.”

Said Chadwick, “If the injunction goes into effect, the counties are ready to perform their duty.”