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April 25, 2004

Gay Marriage At Home and Abroad

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

After Spain recently announced that gay marriage is in the country's future plans, a community in France has now announced that it is going to put on more European state on the map.

Mayor Noel Mamere of Begles, just outside Bordeaux, identified the happy couple as two local men. Under French law, non religious weddings must be conducted by the mayor of a couple's local municipality for their union to be legal.

"There's nothing extraordinary about marrying two people of the same sex in the European Union, because Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands have done it already and the new Spanish prime minister...has put it in his political program," said Mamere, a member of the Green Party.

Although French law does not specifically give same-sex couples the right to marry there is nothing, Mamere said, to ban such unions.

Meanwhile back at home, over in Massachusetts, Republican Governor Romney is hell-bent on finding some way to stop his state from moving forward with gay marriages. The only thing left appears to be an obscure 1913 state law...

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is directing town clerks across the state that they will be charged if they marrying any same-sex couples from outside the commonwealth. The Republican governor who has been thwarted in previous attempts to prevent gay and lesbian couples from marrying when same-sex becomes legal in May says that he is basing his order on a "strict interpretation" of a 1913 law which says that the state cannot marry an out-of-state couple if that marriage would be "void" in the couple's home state.

"Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage," Romney tells the New York Times. "We do not intend to export our marriage confusion to the entire nation."

I am almost positive that Romney is getting pushed to do whatever possible to stop gay marriage by Republican groups nationwide, because once gay marriages start coming out of his state to other states, it will be the first time ever that legal groups will be able to take a look at the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution and start challenging the DOMA laws. This of course would be followed by a unified chorus of Republicans singing the "activist judges" tune, some being the same ones who sang that tune back in the Brown v. Board of Education days or the interracial marriage days.

But speaking of interracial marriage, since this fight has been compared to that one, even though some will say it has nothing to do with each other...

That 1913 law in Massachusetts? Guess why it is there?

The law the Romney is enforcing was created in 1913 to bar interracial marriage and has collected dust since 1967 when the US Supreme Court struck down state laws preventing marriage by two people of different races.

No parallels, oh, of course not!

Posted by Karl-Thomas Musselman at April 25, 2004 04:01 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I don't understand why you are trying to make it into a legal matter. It is not. It is about democracy. Is the majority allowed to say what a marriage is or not?

Posted by: Ricky Vandal at April 25, 2004 07:41 PM

Poor Lil' Ricky. He thinks that if 51 out of a 100 people want to make the remaining 49 slaves, it is OK. Then again, maybe that is what the Amzaon Warrior told him when he was 5.

Posted by: WhoMe? at April 25, 2004 10:25 PM
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