I friend of mine was married in Florida last week. She and her groom went to a civil court. If she they were to get married that day, the clerk said that they were required by law to attend a four-hour class on something like “what an optimum marriage should be,” taught by a recognized religious authority.
Otherwise, they had to wait four days. If they wanted to skip the four-hour presentation and get married that day, the would have to pay an extra $36.25.
In no hurry and adding the $36.25 savings to their future child’s college fund, they went to one conducted by a baptist minister (he is catholic, she is Jewish); when she told them she was Jewish, he “went easy on the Jesus thing,” said my friend, and the minister did his PowerPoint presentation.
If they had wanted, they could have gone to a similar Jewish thing, a catholic thing, or whatever. None were available for atheists, worshipers of the planet Zorkan, etc.
Isn’t this an egregious violation of the Constitution?
Since you can pay a fee and not take the course. And I believe that the fee and the course can be waived all together at the county clerks discretion. Or you can wait three days and not take the course. Seem’s like there are plenty of options for those that don’t want to take the course.
Unconstitutional, why? Because a religious figure taught the class? What if a Marine Captain taught the class, would that be different? Seems the state has a justifiable interest in preventing rush marriages and this might be a means to that end.
Yes it is an egregious violation if the state is permitted require anyone to submit
to any expense for the sake of any religiously-sponsored activity.
This is exactly the kind of hogwash that has driven me away from the Republican party:
the evangelicals, birthers and other wacko nutwads are too powerful.
Godspeed to the ACLU here, and I predict the USSC will overturn this monstrosity
of a law as soon as they get their hands on it.
Thanks for finding the actual code for us. So it looks like it’s not a separation of church and state issue, but the employee needs to be slapped with a wet trout for misrepresenting the actual offer, or the OP’s friend needs to listen more closely.
Well, i’m not going to argue that this wouldn’t stand up to constitutional scrutiny. I’m no expert on Con Law. But it seems to me that this Florida requirement doesn’t even perform the minimum service that you claim for it.
First of all, you can avoid the lesson altogether if you’re willing to wait four days. Well, in my book, four days doesn’t exactly alleviate possible concerns about a “rush marriage.”
Second, there’s no necessary connection between a couple’s commitment to one another, and the length of time between getting a marriage license and performing the ceremony. When my wife and i got married, we had been together as a couple for about three years, we had been living together, and we had decided almost a year beforehand that we were going to get married. But we got our marriage license on a Friday and had the ceremony on a Monday, and we could have done them both on the same day if we had wanted to.
If we had decided to go straight from getting the license to having the ceremony, this “rush” wouldn’t have told the state anything at all about our commitment to one another, because the wedding itself had been planned for months. All it indicated is that we had left it until the end to go to City Hall and get the marriage license.
Completely stupid and pointless law. No surprise it’s Florida, although there are probably also other states with similar stupidity on the books.
Yeah, that’s something i forgot to mention in my earlier post, and which further undermines Morgenstern’s argument about some sort of compelling state interest.
If the state’s interest is sufficiently weak that it can be over-ridden by a $36.25 swipe of your credit card, i really see no reason at all for the rule in the first place.
1998, actually. Part of the Marriage Protection and Preservation Act, HB 1019.
What can I say? It’s Florida. We’ve got a lot of stupid shit to get to (and I personally don’t see anything wrong with the law, just the way it was explained to the OP).
Well, in the first place, Morgenstern used the phrase “justifiable interest,” which sounds like one of the recognized “interest tests” but is not. Second, why do you think this requires a showing of a compelling state interest and not merely a rational relation to a legitimate state interest?
My argument was a political one, not a legal one. I explicitly stated that i was not weighing in on the constitutionality of the issue. My rejection of the idea that the state has a legitimate interest in this is based on the fact that it doesn’t stop “rush” marriages, and that, even to the extent that it does, the whole thing can be overridden by a sub-$40 fee. It’s fucking stupid.
With all due respect to SOCAS and those avid to defend it who posted above, it seems to me this is a Lemon Test issue. Here’s my analysis:
The state arguably has a strong interest in having marriages be solid and stable, owing to the added expenses to the state in dealing with those that fall apart. Requiring a four-hour course in making a strong marriage certainly meets the “rational basis” (AKA gimme) test; there is unfortunately no state or federal constitutional provision that “The legislature shall not pass stupid shit.”
It has long been public policy everywhere that government may use a religious institution in carrying out its legislative mandates, and it is often economically beneficial to do so, provided that the government activity is completely secular in nature, and that the religious institution does not use its “in” as an agent of government to evangelize, pressure, or otherwise attempt to influence those who are not believers or not members of its faith community to become so. Thus, a church food pantry may receive and hand out government surplus food, a denominational service agency may receiove and give out federal money, goods, and services in coping with disaster relief, etc., provided they do not use their role as agent for the government to try to make people Southern Baptists, Catholics, Mormons, or even Christians generally.
In this case, the average community’s pool of people trained to do marriage counseling is likely to be disproportionately loaded with clergy. Not Rev. Billy Bob of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God (membership 22, three of whom graduated high school), but the seminary-graduate Presbyterian, Southern Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Lutheran, or Catholic elder/priest/pastor. He’ll know what needs saying and how at least as well as a freshly-minted Bachelor of Social Work.
And that is why this law is, if rather foolish, constitutional.
And here I thought it was constitutional because it doesn’t require that you go to a class taught by clergy. You can go to one taught by a social worker, a psychologist, a mental health counselor, or any Joe that’s certified by the state. There are so many other options (at least on paper - if they’re only scheduling clergy in reality, then that’s another issue) that to say you *have *to go to one taught by clergy is just wrong.
It’s exactly what i said: the couple can either take the counseling, or pay an extra 30-something dollars.
You made an argument that the state has “a justifiable interest in preventing rush marriages.” But if the counseling requirement were really just about preventing rush marriages, the state would not waive the requirement in exchange for $32.50. Because choosing to pay the money rather than take the counseling does not change the likelihood that your rush marriage will lead to divorce.
I accept that the state, as suggested by you and Polycarp, has some interest in stable marriages, at least from a financial point of view. But if that’s the case, and the state wants to reduce its financial exposure in dealing with divorces, why not just charge larger state fees for those who actually, you know, get divorced?
Also, as i said earlier, this rule is stupid because it takes account only of the length of time between license and marriage, and not the length of time that the couple has actually put into thinking about their union.