PALM BAY, Fla. – A gay couple from Brevard County is suing the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles becasue the state agency canceled their driver's licenses after getting legally married in New York and seeking to change documentation, according to Local 6 News partner Florida Today.
"I think the state has to make a decision to follow the law," said Scott Wall, a 37-year-old real estate agent who works in Indian Harbour Beach. "As of now, (Florida) is breaking the law and they know it. But I'm not going to stay quiet about it."
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Daniel DeSousa, 40, and Wall, married in New York last year and legally changed their last name to Wall-DeSousa through the federal Social Security Administration. Both say Wall-DeSousa is their legal name and should be recognized as a matter of civil rights.
DeSousa, an award-winning school teacher, changed his driver's license in Brevard County, but when Wall tried to do the same, he was told that his marriage certificate wasn't a legal document in Florida. Wall later succeeded in changing his license in Orange County.
"I was basically forced to get my license changed. The DMV has violated our civil liberties and civil rights," Wall said, adding that he has to drive his husband to school for work every day.
The couple said when they went public with their new drivers' licenses in an interview with an Orlando television station earlier this year, they received a letter from the DMV, stating their licenses had been canceled.
"That was blatant intimidation," Wall said. "My husband's license remains canceled because he is not changing his name back."
The lawsuit filed last week in Orlando federal court demands that the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles issue the couple licenses with their new names. The couple said the state agency is violating their rights to due process, equal protection and free speech.
The agency is "trying to suppress the expression that the plaintiffs, as a same-sex couple, are a family," the lawsuit said.
An agency spokesman, John Lucas, said his office hadn't received a copy of the lawsuit and so he couldn't comment on it.
"It was brought to our attention that the license had been improperly issued," Lucas said. "Under law, we were forced to recall it."
Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled the Florida gay marriage ban was unconstitutional. But he stayed his decision while the state appealed it to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judges in four South Florida counties -- Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach -- have ruled that the state's 2008 voter-approved constitutional amendment banning gay marriage violates gay residents' right to equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment