The legal challenge to the voter-enacted ban on same- sex marriages in Arkansas, currently before the state Supreme Court, wasn't born in the hive of some left-leaning think tank or crafted in the glossy suite of a high-rise Little Rock law firm.
The seed for the lawsuit, which seeks to strike down anti-gay-marriage laws in Arkansas, was sown in a hospital in Arizona some 20 years ago where a young attorney and mother of five sat beside her dying uncle.
Cheryl Maples, now 64, was just a few years younger than her uncle Richard Alan Ware, and the two grew up together, more brother and sister than uncle and niece.
When he publicly revealed that he was homosexual in the mid-1980s, the rest of his family, including his mother, rejected him.
By the early 1990s, Ware was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1993, Maples flew to Arizona and spent the last two months of his life by his side.
When he died, Maples was heartbroken. And as far as she could tell, she was the only one.
"He was alone and dying, and the only person he could reach out to was me. That included his mother," she said. "When he died, she told me how sorry she was -- for me," Maples said. "It was not her son. It was someone else."
Twenty years later, Maples gets misty-eyed when talking about her uncle. A self-described "bleeding heart liberal," she sometimes gets choked up in court as well.
During her April 17 oral arguments before Pulaski County Circuit Judge Chris Piazza, who went on to side with her and fellow attorney Jack Wagoner and strike down the state's same-sex marriage ban, Maples was in tears as she argued her case.
During oral arguments before the state Supreme Court on Nov. 20, Maples' voice broke as she described Arkansans she was fighting for.
"In Eureka Springs, two 80-year-old men who'd been together for 58 years, they were crying [when they got married]. ... The reason they were crying was because they said ... when they die, the other one will be able to claim their body," she told the high court. "Man, that got to me. I've been married to the same man for 46 years, and things like that I just take for granted."
Maples wants marriage equality for her clients, but also for her daughter, who revealed that she was gay after a failed heterosexual marriage.
Five weeks after hearing the case, the state Supreme Court has not issued its ruling. But a federal judge, moving more quickly, has declared the same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.
An Unlikely Path
Unlike her partner attorney in the case, Wagoner -- a Little Rock attorney who is a regular on state and national best-lawyer lists -- Maples' Searcy-based law practice had a small profile.
A one-woman firm, Maples had limited resources compared with the attorney general's office stable of attorneys, researchers and investigators.
When Maples filed her challenge to the state's gay-marriage ban on July 1, 2013, she did so with little fanfare. When gay-rights activists and players in the legal community caught wind of her intentions, they responded with a collective "Huh?" said Maples' daughter, Melina Maples-Granger.
"She was told 'Who are you?' Give us that lawsuit and have our lawyers look at it and fix it,'" Maples-Granger said. "'You're just some small-town lawyer.' She asked me, 'Am I crazy?' I said, 'Mom, no, it's a beautiful lawsuit.'"
Early in her life, Maples' top priority was the same as that of most of the women she grew up with: marriage and children.
She married Richard Maples, a boy from Marianna, the day after she graduated from high school in Fayetteville in 1968.
After years of traveling from military base to military base with her airman husband, the couple and their children settled in Northwest Arkansas.
Maples was 31 years old when she enrolled in college at the University of Arkansas. Soon after, her family moved to Little Rock where her husband had secured a teaching job.
Feeling pressed for time, she described her education as a "mission" "to hurry."
She graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2.5 years. She got her law degree 2.5 years after that and passed the Bar Exam in early 1987.
Before entering law school in Little Rock, Maples won the coveted Truman Scholarship, which at the time went to about one student in each state and was meant to help pay for the higher education of outstanding students devoted to public service.
"I was going to change the world," she said. "But then reality set in."
Out of law school, she had three teenage daughters and a mortgage, and needed to make some money.
She went into practice, handling cases ranging from criminal law to family law, and developed a soft spot for underdogs and outliers, for defendants whom society had already judged as guilty.
In September 1997, Maples made headlines when she took on the defense of Beebe woman Arden Wilson, who was accused of giving birth to a baby and dumping it in a garbage container in Vilonia.
The nameless child was dubbed "The Angel of Vilonia," and Wilson was arrested and charged with abuse of a corpse.
Pointing out that her client's tubes were tied, later DNA testing vindicated Wilson.
It was during this case that Maples had her first heart attack.
Working with clients across the state and running her own firm put a lot of stress on her body, Maples said.
Since then, she has had seven more heart attacks. She has had battles with kidney cancer and other maladies, and was told multiple times that she wouldn't survive.
But she is still here.
Wright vs. Arkansas, et.al
The state and federal lawsuits against Arkansas' same-sex-marriage bans include a number of couples and represent the interests of thousands of same-sex couples in the state.
But the first name on the first case, the one attached to the cover page of every filing and brief, is Kendall Wright.
Wright, who was legally married in Iowa to her partner Julia last year after an "illegal" ceremony in Sherwood in 2008, said she was delighted that she found a lawyer like Maples to take on her case. Wright initially had approached her former Little Rock-based attorney about filing it.
"He would not challenge the constitution in Arkansas. He wouldn't take it. He was nice about it, he just wasn't comfortable with it," she said. Then she met Maples. "It was nice to find a lawyer who had the balls to take it on," Wright said.
Maples and Wright met through mutual friends of Maples' daughter, who over the years had been Maples' caretaker and paralegal.
In 2004 -- the year the first gay marriages began in Massachusetts after that state's Supreme Court struck down the state ban -- Maples-Granger, who was married and had two children, revealed that she was gay. Her announcement came as a bit of a shock to her mother, who had seen her daughter's struggles and had attributed them to a bad marriage.
"I wasn't expecting that," Maples said. "But I still loved her."
It took Maples some time to come around, Maples-Granger said.
"She was not happy at first. She thought it was a phase," Maples-Granger said. "It took a couple years. But then she sent me an article about gay rights one day. And when she did that, I knew that she had accepted it."
As Maples' health problems worsened over the years, she scaled back on her work, and she and her husband moved out of the Little Rock area so she could retire.
But, it didn't take.
When Maples learned about the challenge filed with the U.S. Supreme Court involving the nation's Defense of Marriage Act -- United States v. Windsor -- she started studying.
Confined to bed rest, she read the history of different state and federal court challenges to the gay-marriage law. She worked quietly, diligently and often late at night.
On June 26, 2013, when the nation's highest court struck down the federal gay-marriage ban, Maples was prepared to file Wright's suit.
Five days after the Windsor ruling, Maples filed.
Soon, lawyers were filing similar challenges in courthouses across the country. The night before she filed her case in Pulaski County Circuit Court, Maples got a call from officials with the American Civil Liberties Union pleading with her not to file.
"They told me not to do it. 'It's not the right time.' I'd be making a mistake, I'd be ruining the possibility of maybe bringing it up later. I did it anyway," Maples said. "We've kissed and made up since then."
Days after she filed her suit, a former law school classmate, Wagoner, submitted his suit in federal court.
Like Maples, Wagoner had been watching the U.S. Supreme Court case with growing enthusiasm. He theorized that a challenge to the ban would best succeed in federal court, in part, because federal judges are appointed for life, whereas state judges must be re-elected and, consequently, face political pressures.
When he learned that his former classmate was mounting a challenge in state court, Wagoner reached out.
"I said 'Hey, can you let me help you out, and you can help me out on the federal case?'" Wagoner said. "We expected the [state] case to be moved to federal court because it involves mainly U.S. constitutional issues ... but they left it in state court."
Maples welcomed Wagoner's offer.
"Two minds are not a bad thing," she said. "And my health is not always, my history has been up and down. I wanted to make sure nothing caused problems. ... Any delays could harm my clients."
Tag-teaming over different arguments in state and federal courts, Maples, Wagoner and attorneys in Wagoner's firm put in hundreds of hours of work that paid off in May with Piazza's ruling. Then on Nov. 20, the attorneys appeared that morning before the Arkansas Supreme Court for oral arguments in the state's challenge to Piazza's ruling, and later that day before U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker.
A week later, Baker struck down the state's gay-marriage ban, finding that it violated federal laws that protect a person's right to marry whomever he chooses, and laws against gender discrimination. The state is appealing.
Though not close in law school, Wagoner said he and Maples shared a defiant, pro-underdog spirit.
Nearly 30 years after receiving the Truman Scholarship, Maples looks at this case as an opportunity to make good on the public-service investment.
"I'm too old to [make a name for myself]. This is the greatest thing I've ever done. I'm not saying it because of any glory I might receive. ... If we win, it will impact thousands of lives," Maples said. "I can go to my grave knowing my life had some meaning."
Until then, Maples said she will continue to fight. She has new clients, many suing over some form of discrimination linked to their sexuality.
Maples jokes about her legacy of making it into the history books, even if as a footnote. In time, she said, gay marriage will be something people look back on and wonder: What was the big deal?
"Someday," she said, "it's not going to be a big issue anymore."
SundayMonday on 12/28/2014