Same-sex couples jumping through hoops

Let’s see if we can sort this story out a bit.

The Amarillo Globe-News reported Sunday about a same-sex couple seeking a “family membership” at the Amarillo Town Club. The club has denied the couple such a membership, citing the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

The couple, two women, were asked to provide a marriage license. They aren’t yet married, but plan to wed soon presumably in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage. The club informed the women that the marriage license had to be issued in Texas to make their marriage legal. Well, the state doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, so that’s out.

The couple is petitioning the Town Club to grant them a family membership and to allow them to proceed with their weight-loss plan.

Here’s where it gets a bit sticky for the couple: The Amarillo Town Club is owned by Baptist Community Services, a faith-based organization. It’s not a public institution, funded by taxpayer money. Its members pay the freight with membership dues. Thus, the Town Club is within its rights to set admission policy any way it so chooses, as long as it doesn’t discriminate.

You want it to get even stickier?

Here goes.

My wife and I joined the Amarillo Town Club more than a decade ago. We, too, have a family membership. We signed up as husband and wife.

No one at the Amarillo Town Club — either at the main facility at 45th and Cornell or the one at Hillside — ever asked us to produce a marriage license. I cannot recall precisely, but perhaps they asked us to show them driver’s licenses to prove we were who we said we were.

A marriage license? The issue never came up. Were we even legally married? No one ever asked that question.

For the record, my wife and I were married — legally — on Sept. 4, 1971 in a little Presbyterian Church in southeast Portland, Ore. That’s in case anyone is interested.

All of this leads me to conclude that it appears some discrimination involving the two young women at the center of this story may have taken place.

Yes, indeed. This story is going to get quite complicated.