Reverand Maurice Blanchard, an openly gay Baptist minister from Kentucky in the United States, was arrested with his partner for refusing to leave the county clerk’s office after applying for a marriage license as a form of protest.
“If we don’t act, we are accomplices in our own discrimination,” Blanchard told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “We have to resist.”
While gay marriage is illegal in the state, the 34-year-old preacher decided to go with his partner, Dominique James, and ask for a marriage license because they felt a “spiritual obligation” and to show that to show that gay couples will not be “silent accomplices to our own discrimination.
The two were arrested on trespassing charges on Jan. 22 after refusing to leave the Jefferson County clerk’s office.
Blanchard and James got married in a Unitarian Church six years ago. “It is important that the place we have our home and where we worship allows us the same civil rights that others have,” Blanchard said. “We love where we are from.”
