Speaking of marriage in Massachusetts...

[mmcirvin]

Earlier I was talking with ronebofh about how gay marriage would work across state lines given the full-faith-and-credit clause of the Constitution. The 1996 "Defense of Marriage Act" says that one state doesn't have to recognize another's marriages, but is that stipulation constitutional? (Most people seem to think the answer is "probably", and I've heard that this is generally consistent with cases of other differences between marriage laws.)

Here's something I didn't know (found out via Andrew Sullivan, whose admiration of George W. Bush seems to have waned over the FMA): for the specific case of Massachusetts, the question is legally moot, at least as regards the scenario of people streaming over the border in crowds to get hitched. Massachusetts law explicitly prohibits marrying people who live in another state where the marriage would be illegal, and declares such marriages null and void if somebody does manage to get one. I suppose the courts could overturn that, though I doubt they will. (I wonder if the law was operative in the days when many other states had laws against interracial marriage.)

Having poked around the Massachusetts marriage statutes a few years back for obvious reasons, I feel as if I should have known that.

So don't come to Massachusetts just to get married here, unless you're planning to stay.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There's also the interesting question of what constitutes adequate evidence of intent to leave the jurisdiction where the marriage is illegal. But I imagine that there's already some case law about that. Presumably it would be pretty clear from the subsequent behavior of the parties involved, going by the extant definitions of what constitutes a state resident. (I didn't officially become a Massachusetts resident until I had been going to school here for a couple of years and got tired of the baroque tax situation. I think maybe my driver's license needed to be renewed in any event.)

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

So our plan to sneak the few miles over the border is ruined?

Damnation.

I was planning to stand on the border near that Mobil gas station between Seekonk and Barrington and skip back and forth over the border, singing "married" ... "not married" ... "married" ... "not married" ...just to hilight the ludicrousness of there being no federal recognition of gay marriage that would transcend the state laws.

But in any event, moving to Mass. would involve being able to actually afford the rent, so that's out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'd also heard that lawyers tell people not to go to Vermont just to get civil unions, for a different reason: The Vermont civil union law was purposely written to define them as marriage-in-all-but-name. So the provision for dissolving one is exactly like Vermont's divorce law, which requires (one? both? I forget) of the parties to be resident in Vermont for some period of time. And there's no way to dissolve them outside of Vermont because nobody else recognizes them in the first place.

(On the other hand, that would presumably make divorce unnecessary for the time being, unless you're going to spend some time in Vermont in the future. Personally, if I were in a situation to get one of these, I think I'd be offended if they made them any easier to dissolve than a marriage. It seems to me that halfway civil unions that are kind of like marriage but not as serious actually would be potentially corrosive to the role of marriage in society, unlike real gay marriages.)

(In fact, this may be part of what's going on in Scandinavia, where Stanley Kurtz claims that "de facto gay marriage", which sounds as if it's actually some sort of civil-union arrangement, has already nearly destroyed the institution of marriage. (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp) Actually, even if you take his report at face value, his case for gay marriage being the primary cause is pretty weak; it sounds as if the much bigger corrosive influence has been straight people like me who (1) were atheists and (2) cohabited before getting married, and the push for gay marriage was a symptom of that shift that brought stuff out into the open. His strongest case is Norway, where he says that bad elite liberals forced "de facto gay marriage" on an unwilling population and blew everything to hell. But it sounds as if the big change in Norway was a debate over the role of the established church in society that was going to happen sooner or later, and I wonder how it would translate to a society that is highly religious with strong church-state separation, like the US, instead of relatively irreligious with a church heavily entwined with the government.)

(In any case, I apologize for doing stuff with my future wife in 1996 through 2000 that made other people think bad things that destroy their marriages. It would be interesting to hear from people in Scandinavia as to whether they think the resulting situation is really a major social disaster.)

(The last paragraph may have sounded flippant, but I actually do take this stuff seriously; I go through life worrying that I'm doing seemingly harmless things that are actually having horrible eight- or ninth-order social effects, so I'm pretty susceptible to claims that this is going on. But I have to draw the line somewhere, because if you read both left- and right-wing political literature it becomes immediately clear that every possible human activity is claimed to be bringing the apocalypse by somebody or other, and in many cases they even have plausible-sounding arguments.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Marriage was ruined... FOREVER!!!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I see that Gabriel Rosenberg is way ahead of me here (http://gabrielrosenberg.typepad.com/galois/2004/01/kurtz_on_marria.html), and talks a better line than Sullivan.