Boston, April 24 (New York Times) - Same-sex couples who live outside Massachusetts will not be able to marry in Massachusetts when gay marriage becomes legal here next month, Gov. Mitt Romney said.Governor Ramney (ROM is permanent; RAM, happily, is temporary) based this decision on a 1913 law so obscure and so long unenforced that few people would have ever heard of it. The law says that the state can't marry out-of-state couples of their marriage would be "void" in their home state. Governor Rockbrain said he intends to rewrite the form for marriage license applications to require proof of where a couple plans to live. He also openly acknowledged he was using the broadest possible interpretation of the law, under which even states that lack laws specifically banning same-sex marriages would be covered - so unless a couple could show they live in Massachusetts or intend to move there after the marriage, they would be denied a license.
"Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage," Mr. Romney said in an interview on Friday. "We do not intend to export our marriage confusion to the entire nation."
It's instructive that the 1913 law was created in large part to ban interracial marriage - and is now being used to enforce, as far as it can be pushed to do so, a different type of discrimination. Some human rights lawyers claim that the law only applies to states - about 20 - that say same-sex marriage would be "void," rather than "invalid" or "prohibited," but I find that a thin reed on which to build an argument. I expect a legal challenge is inevitable, but what I would like to see is Witless Romney challenged directly through it to justify using the law as he proposes to do. Demand to know when this law was last enforced, demand to know when was the last time Massachusetts surveyed other states (as he proposes to do) to see what their marriage laws are in order to avoid marrying people here who couldn't get married at home, demand to know how this is not intended to single out an indentifiable group - same-sex couples - for discriminatory treatment. (No, the fact everyone would be asked the same questions isn't an answer if the intent is to discriminate, which is clearly is, as it's avowedly designed to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.)
For now, three state legislators have introduced a bill this week to repeal the law and
[a]t least one town clerk, David Rushford of Worcester, said earlier this month that he would defy rules that asked him to demand evidence of intent to move to Massachusetts. "I wouldn't even ask them," Mr. Rushford said. "I don't feel we should be challenging people on whether they intend to become Massachusetts residents or not."You go, guy.
Footnote, Beyond Absurd Dept.: The good guv, who is outright opposed to same-sex marriage, strongly supported a constitutional amendment banning it, and recently sought the authority to appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court for a stay of its order, says he's not being discriminatory, oh no. In fact, he actually said - if you can believe this - that
his main motivation was to protect a same-sex couple's children if the couple separated and "one or the other of them would stand up and say, 'Hey, I don't owe you any alimony, I don't owe this child any child support because the marriage was null and void to begin with.'"Oh my, yes, his real concern is protecting some poor innocent partner from being screwed out of alimony or child support. It's really for their own good! Really!
Footnote to the footnote: Rockbrain added that
in training sessions next month, the clerks would be told that "if they don't make a good-faith effort to follow the law, the people who are punished by that are not the governor, not the opponents of same-sex marriage, but rather the children born to those unions or adopted to those unions."Uh, "born to those unions?" I think it's about time his parents had that talk with him....
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment