This is interesting. First of all, even though I’ve lived in PA for at least 35 years, I never knew that there were two different kinds of marriage license in this state.
Secondly, if the governing body of the church you’re trying to “protect” speaks out against your position, are you really protecting them? The clerks who are putting roadblocks in place against the “Quaker licenses” sound more like they’re trying to prevent non-religious and/or non-Christian couples from marrying.
I have to admit, I’m gobsmacked to discover that even if I were straight and trying to marry a woman, I’d still have hoops to jump through to get there.
Interesting. I don’t know which type we have. We got our license in Delaware County (I think - that is where my wife was living) but got married in Philadelphia. I suspect we’re okay, since we got married in the Ethical Culture Society with a real non-religious leader, and not in a Quaker type situation. That was 30 years ago though.
The new slippery slope: marriage is no longer just between men and women; it’s only between religious men and women. Soon we’ll see only Christian men and women being allowed to be married. And then only Protestants!
Gays are a threat to the institution of marriage, my ass. These clerks who are pushing to only recognize marriages with a religious officiant are. Any of them posting on this message board here? No? Good. They should all be taken out and shot.
What a load of organic fertilizer! Trying to de-recognize “Quaker weddings” in Pennsylvania is preposterous. Trying to pry certain groups of ministers out of performing weddings clearly tromps on the first amendment.
In Indiana, when a gay-marriage suit made its way up through the courts, the reason for the no-gay-marriage ruling at the top was ridiculous. It made me wonder if I had been married at all. The purpose of marriage, said the court, is procreation, so gays can’t. My wife and I just celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, but we might not be married! We never had children, you see.:smack:
Reading the linked article reinforces my feeling that the state – that is, the GOVERNMENT – needs to get itself entirely out of the business of deciding what marriages are solemnized and which are not.
Gay marriage is, indeed, is a threat to heterosexual marriages. Because when gays get married, that causes religious nutjobs to start looking critically at the marriage laws to see how to stop the evil gays. When they do that, it’s a short step for them to also look at marriage laws to see how to stop all the other marriages between evil people, like atheists and jaywalkers. But since the evil people are in the majority, once that happens, they’ll force all of the good, God-fearing Real Americans (all 17 of them) to not be married any more, either. And it’s all because of the gays! If it weren’t for them, the religious people wouldn’t have been forced to collapse the entire institution of marriage!
I don’t have much add debate-wise, myself, since I think it’s going to be impossible to accomplish what the Association of Clerks apparently wishes to accomplish. They’re looking for a way to invalidate the Internet “ordained” Universal Life ministers without disturbing Quaker marriages (who don’t use officiants). So they’re saying, in essence, that you can have a judge, a priest, a minister, or a rabbi, no problem; a civil official or a legitimate religious official is fine. And if you’re really a Quaker, you can have no officiant at all. But having an Internet-ordained officiant is worse than having no officiant at all.
However, the problem is clear:
Given that reality, what do you believe the clerks should do?
I honestly don’t know. To my layman’s eyes, that ruling sounds wrong…it’s basically determining what religious affiliation is “acceptable”, in a milieu where “no-affiliation” or “no-celebrant” are legally capable ways of effecting a marriage. To determine that you must have an active congregation or church property to act as a celebrant while keeping the Quaker license legal seems like a contradiction.
Personally? I think the state lege should step in and make the marriage requirements uniform throughout the state. This county-by-county stuff shocked me when I read the article. I had no idea it was that fragmented (not having an expectation of actually using the state’s marriage power, I hadn’t exactly researched the state of that power before this).
If the assembly DID unify the marriage laws, I would hope that they would explicitly remove any requirement for a religious celebrant to solemnify a marriage. It seems like that would be a straight shot to the state Supreme Court on the basis of religious discrimination against non-believers or believers (like the Quakers) in marriages without celebrants.
Please. Much as I’d love to see fundies under every bed here, this is not actually a religious vs non-religious issue. Quakers are far more effected by this than I was, since I had a totally non-religious but non-Quaker wedding. Those who get married by judges, like my daughter, ditto.
What it the constutionally permissible definition of a religion? Before the net, ULC people got ordained by mail. It can’t be the lack of a building - plenty of churches don’t own buildings. I suspect any random ULC “minister” can collect a congregation in no time. In any case, I thought the whole point of Quaker weddings is that you can basically marry yourself. Confining this to Quakers only seems to be impermissible. How can they have a particular class of wedding for only one specific religious group? So I’d say the state of the “minister” should be irrelevant. If I were a clerk or someone refused a Quaker wedding I’d sue on First Amendment grounds.
I believe that some mechanism should be invoked (an appeal, some other case, something) which officially recognizes that the statement in the prior is unconstitutional and that, indeed, people can get married in any way and by anyone they like (or no one), irrespective of religion and congregations and buildings.
Well, let me ask: how much of a binding precedent is the decision of the York County Judge? My hunch is that it’s binding solely for that one county, and a guiding precedent for decisions elsewhere – which means good lawyers will be doing distinguishing memoranda showing how their case isn’t like the case she ruled on.
Without getting into constitutionality, it must be noted that different religions are treated differently under the law.
I serve on the local Selective Service board - and it was spelled out quite explicitly in training that exemptions for the draft that apply to clergy or students of the clergy do not apply to holders of mail-order ordinations.
The above represents government policy - not necessarily my own. And frankly I hope this is cleared up quickly. It seems to me that these are perfectly valid marriages with proper licenses - further decisions ought to recognize this.
First place the decision made it clear that non-religious marriages performed by JPs and such were completely legal. In the second place, unless the law has changed PA recognizes common-law marriages. Essentially, if a couple passes themselves as married, they are in common-law (and there is not–or was not when I was growing up) any particular time such as the commonly believed seven years.
Anyway, this sounds to me like a teapot tempest. The first time a literate judge gets to rule on it, the decision will be reversed. It does confirm my belief that marriage is no business of the state. They should confine themselves to registering marriage; how it is performed (and between whom) should be no business of theirs.
Hey, maybe I’m illegitimate! My parents got a marriage licence in Delaware County (because they didn’t want it in the Philadelphia newspapers) and married secretly in Philadelphia. By whom? I haven’t the foggiest idea. Probably a JP, though. This was all 75 years ago.
I live in Prince William County, Virginia. We’re about half the size of Bucks County but have a pretty large population - for the purposes of this discussion the comparison can be made understanding the offices in question can be scaled.
As far as county row offices (called constitutional offices in Virginia), we make do with comparatively few - we have a sheriff, a commonwealth attorney, and a clerk of the court. We have an elected soil and water commission with considerable power over zoning. Our commissioner of the revenue and treasurer were absorbed into an appointed finance department - most Virginia counties elect these positions. All in all this is manageable.
Bucks County, like most Pennsylvania counties, has a clerk of courts, a controller, a coroner, a district attorney, two jury commissioners, a prothonotary, a recorder of deeds, a register of wills, a sheriff and a treasurer.
Most of these are elected positions - the woman above in Bucks County who denied the license was elected to her job. Register of Wills also serves as the Clerk of the Orphan’s Court. She will be running for reelection or higher office someday, and is likely using this issue to maintain her political visibility. This wouldn’t be necessary if this particular position were an appointed one.
I’m not saying this is creating this problem, but it sure is compounding it.
One thing we have here is officials of the government claiming to have the right to decide who can be a minister in the state of Pennsylvania. That’s a new development. Up until that, a minister ordained in any of the United States was officially accepted as a minister in all the rest.
Years ago, I wrote to Indiana’s Secretary of State’s office to find if a California-ordained minister needed additional paperwork to perform marriages in Indiana. He replied that no special paperwork was required, because of the above-mentioned interstate courtesy. That’s when I got this info.
You may personally decide whether to respect a minister ordained in a church you’ve never been to. As a judge or a county clerk, you do not have that right.