Couple Fights Axed Wedding Announcement

A gay couple are filing a complaint against The Dallas Morning News for rejecting their wedding announcement and then billing them $1,034 for the ad that never ran.

Mark Reed-Walkup and Dante Walkup requested that their wedding, performed via Skype by an officiant in Washington, D.C., while they stayed in Texas, be announced in the newspaper in December. However, the newspaper rejected their announcement because their wedding would not be legally recognized in Texas. Instead, editors offered to put them in the Commitments section, which typically appears on the same page as Weddings.

Still, the couple of 11 years filed a complaint using the city of Dallas's antidiscrimination ordinance. According to the local Fox affiliate, 53 complaints have been filed under the nine-year-old law, but none of the cases have gone to court. However, because gay citizens are not considered a protected class in the state, and because the newspaper is a private business, legal advocates do not anticipate their case moving too far forward.