I couldn’t help but cringe a bit when news of my native county crept up in sev­eral news sto­ries about gay mar­riage in Cal­i­for­nia, for exam­ple in this Wall Street Jour­nal article:

June 17 marks the date that gay and les­bian cou­ples can marry legally in Cal­i­for­nia, fol­low­ing a land­mark ruling by the state’s Supreme Court in May that struck down the ban on same-​sex mar­riage. The day will be marked by joyous cel­e­bra­tions and eager cou­ples earn­ing a right they have waited years to obtain.

Yet, the occa­sion will also be punc­tu­ated by the divi­sion it cre­ates through­out the state. On the one hand, San Fran­cisco County has added addi­tional staff and expanded hours so the clerk’s office can accom­mo­date the surge in demand from same-​sex cou­ples seek­ing mar­riage licenses and wed­ding ceremonies….

In con­trast, the Butte County clerk-​recorder issued a June 11 news release saying her office will stop per­form­ing wed­ding cer­e­monies alto­gether–for gay and het­ero­sex­ual couples.

For Rick Perl­stein and others, actions like this last amount to noth­ing less than a twenty-first-century ver­sion of the mas­sive resis­tance cam­paigns that fol­lowed Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion. Until I looked into it, I was inclined to agree.

But it turns out that what’s going on in Butte County is much less sin­is­ter than the WSJ and others would have us believe. As this arti­cle from the Chico Enterprise-​Record points out, Can­dace Grubbs, the Butte County Clerk-​Recorder, isn’t doing any­thing to pre­vent cou­ples from get­ting mar­riage licenses. Rather, Grubbs made a deci­sion back in March–long before the Cal­i­for­nia State Supreme Court deci­sion on gay mar­riage–that for bud­getary rea­sons her staff would no longer per­form civil cer­e­monies at the county Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing. (In other words, the county staff won’t be doing any actual marrying.)

“Performing wed­ding ceremonies” are, it’s true, the words that the WSJ arti­cle uses, but the impli­ca­tion of the arti­cle is very clearly that Grubbs’s deci­sion is sup­posed to be some kind of puni­tive action under­taken in response to the gay-​marriage ruling.

Here’s how Grubbs explains what’s actu­ally going on:

Grubbs told the E-R she rec­og­nized the timing of the announce­ment is unfor­tu­nate given the back­drop of gay mar­riage, but she said the events are unrelated.

“The deci­sion to dis­con­tinue mar­riages is bud­getary, and not polit­i­cal, or values,” Grubbs said.*

Grubbs said the deci­sion to cease all civil mar­riages was made in March, when she was required to pre­pare her future year’s budget for sub­mis­sion to the county administration.

She said the county is not required by law to pro­vide mar­riage ser­vices. Last year, mar­riage ser­vices gen­er­ated only about $7,000 for her depart­ment, which she explained has to be finan­cially self-​supporting as far as clerk and recorder duties are concerned.

Grubbs said her office is going to hold two vacant posi­tions open during the coming year, and there was no way to con­tinue to do mar­riages with the smaller staff.

Now, of course I rec­og­nize that phrases like “events are unrelated” and “the decision…is budgetary” were often used as a kind of offi­cial code in the rhetoric of mas­sive resis­tance, but in this case Grubbs really does seem to be speak­ing on the level. As the arti­cle goes on to note, cou­ples who still want to be mar­ried at the county office can pay $50 to appoint a friend or rel­a­tive as a single-​day “marriage commissioner.”

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*Note: It’s worth men­tion­ing that this last state­ment, as the E-R arti­cle tells us, is not exactly accu­rate. But the values that seem to have aided Grubbs’s deci­sion aren’t the (anti gay mar­riage) values that the WSJ implies:

Grubbs said she does have a philo­soph­i­cal objec­tion to her staff doing mar­riages, and it has noth­ing to do with the gender of the people being wed.

She said there is no pri­vate space in the county Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing that is suit­able for a wedding.

“A mar­riage is a dig­ni­fied per­sonal event in a person’s life,” she said. Being mar­ried in an office lobby or in the public atrium of the Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing is not an appro­pri­ate venue for such a cer­e­mony, Grubbs said.

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UPDATE (6/18): After con­ced­ing, as I did, that he might have been too quick to jump the gun, Perl­stein points to a San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle arti­cle that makes the same basic argu­ment as the WSJ piece I quote above. For rea­sons I’ll get to, I’m still not con­vinced by either arti­cle, but I do want to clar­ify that here and in the post above I’m only talk­ing about Butte County. It’s clear to me that the clerk-​recorder of Kern County, the other county that gets men­tioned in the same breath as Butte in all these arti­cles, is very clearly repris­ing the Lester Maddox role that Perl­stein orig­i­nally suggested.

I’ve got two rea­sons, one neg­a­tive and one pos­i­tive, for doubt­ing this to be the case in Butte County. (And trust me, nei­ther of them have to do with native pride.) The neg­a­tive reason is that no one’s been able to offer up any good evi­dence why we should doubt the rea­sons Grubbs gave. Con­trary to the case of the Kern County Clerk-​Recorder, there’s no evi­dence in the public record that Grubbs has ever said a neg­a­tive thing about gay mar­riage. What’s more, in the E-R arti­cle, she was frank about the bad timing of the decision.

The pos­i­tive reason is this post by gay blog­ger and Butte res­i­dent Richard Seward. Unlike the author of the Chron­i­cle arti­cle, Seward was able to speak to Grubbs and says he came away con­vinced–despite his ini­tial skep­ti­cism–of her good faith. Here’s his response to a doubt­ful commenter:

You know Karen, it is real easy to believe that Can­dace Grubbs is only stop­ping cer­e­monies for homo­pho­bic rea­sons … just like the Clerk in Kern County. You read the com­ments made by the Clerk in Kern County, the eva­sive twad­dle, and you just know she is a homophobe.

But I spent a good 15+ min­utes on the phone with Ms. Grubbs this morn­ing. I probed this way and that. She sure had all the cor­rect answers of a good busi­ness woman and a non-​homophobe. I did not pick up ANY bias at all in her deci­sion to stop the cer­e­monies … none at all. And I was look­ing for it.

She did not know me from Adam. She knew I was not a reporter and did live in the county. That is all she knew about me. But we had a most pleas­ant time on the phone … well I was migrain­ing and not speak­ing very clearly so I had the sym­pa­thy thing going for me. But I really and truly did not pick up any bias.

I’m pre­pared to change my mind in a second on this if some new evi­dence comes to light, but fail­ing that it seems to me that Ms. Grubbs deserves the ben­e­fit of our (pos­si­bly hasty) doubt.