History in the High Court

From pop-up parties to weddings, New Yorkers celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States.

The decades-long debate about whether same-sex marriage should be allowed in the United States was finally settled Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled gay and lesbian couples can get married anywhere in the country.

The White House is lit up in rainbow colors in commemoration of the Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize same-sex marriage.

Gay and lesbian couples in Washington and across the nation are celebrating Friday’s ruling, which will put an end to same-sex marriage bans in the 14 states that still maintain them.

President Barack Obama, who himself has acknowledged an evolution over gay rights, said Friday that the Supreme Court’s ruling giving same-sex couples the right to marry nationwide represents a day when justice “arrives like a thunderbolt.”

Same-sex couples won the right to marry nationwide Friday as a divided Supreme Court handed a crowning victory to the LGBT rights movement, setting off a jubilant cascade of long-delayed weddings in states where they had been forbidden.

Two men in their 80s got the first same-sex marriage license Friday in Dallas, some gay couples elsewhere were denied and Gov. Greg Abbott, dismayed by the Supreme Court’s ruling, ordered state agencies to respect religious objectors.

Many Michigan gay couples quickly married Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in a case involving two Detroit-area nurses who said they were elated “that this day has finally come.”

A court in Atlanta started marrying gay couples Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Within hours of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision Friday to legalize same-sex marriage – upending Missouri’s constitutional ban on the practice – same-sex couples in the state applied and were granted marriage licenses.

Same-sex couples across the state of Tennessee were going to county clerks’ offices to get marriage licenses on what many were calling “day one.”