NY’s unsplit decision for gay duo KO’d
City Hall wooed a gay Polish couple to Manhattan to marry them when their own country wouldn’t, then later balked at granting them a divorce — arguing they weren’t Big Apple “residents.’’
The wedded diss was finally overturned Tuesday by a Manhattan Supreme Court judge in a precedent-setting ruling.
It’s a case of “basic fairness and simple justice,’’ wrote Justice Matthew Cooper in his decision.
The two grooms, Andrzej Gruszczynski and Wiktor Jerzy Twarkowski of Warsaw, Poland, married in December 2013, the first year of the Bloomberg administration’s “NYC I Do” campaign, which encouraged gay tourists to come to the city to marry if they were banned elsewhere.
The 30-something newlyweds then flew home to Poland, which still doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, a few days later.
But by September 2016, the union soured. “They just stopped loving each other,” their lawyer, Livius Ilasz, told The Post.
Cooper noted, “Unfortunately, the fate of same-sex married couples is no different from that of heterosexual ones: All too often people who marry in love end up at some later point falling out of love.’’
The men filed an uncontested divorce proceeding in Manhattan, usually a rubber-stamp case for couples not fighting over custody or assets.
But a clerk found the case’s residency requirement wasn’t met because both parties live in Poland.
Overriding the clerk, Cooper declared: “Having accepted New York’s invitation to come and exercise their right to marry as a same-sex couple, the parties” should not be “deprived of the equally fundamental right to end the marriage.”
Ilasz hailed Cooper’s ruling as precedent-setting for “waiving the resi- dency requirement” to grant the divorce.
The lawyer predicted it may “spark reforms in conservative European countries to at least recognize [gay people’s] rights” to marry and divorce.
Susan Sommer, a director with the LGBT group Lambda Legal, hailed the judge for recognizing that “to give the dignity of marriage its fullest meaning you have to provide a means for a couple to part ways through divorce.”