< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
While our legislators work overtime to protect us from the threat of gay marriages imported from Hawaii, we need to look at how all this hysteria, so useful to the Buchanan campaign and various family-values hustlers, came about.
The legal intricacies of the Hawaiian marriage law are
neither here nor there. The consideration here is Article
4, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution: Full Faith and
Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts,
Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other
State.
This means that if you get a divorce in one state, other states must recognize the divorce, even if the divorce was granted on grounds not recognized in your home state.
That may sound arcane now, but 25 years ago, divorce was a major industry in Nevada.
In New York, for instance, and adultery was one of the
few acceptable causes for divorce. The adultery was often
proved
by photographers bursting into a hotel room
to catch the offenders in the act.
When couples wanted a divorce without these
complications, one partner would move to Nevada, which
required only six weeks of residency and offered vague but
generous grounds like incompatibility
or mental
cruelty.
Thanks to the U.S. constitution, New York would recognize the Nevada divorce, even though the flimsy grounds were morally repugnant to the Empire State.
Now let us move to the start of divorces -- marriage. States generally recognize marriages performed in other states, even if the marriages violate one state's laws.
In Colorado, both partners must be at least 18 to marry without parental consent. In Mississippi, a 15-year-old girl can marry a 17-year-old boy, and neither needs parental permission. If they then moved to Colorado, should we recognize them as married?
Or, since our legislature has decided that marriages between such minors, performed without parental consent, are not licit in Colorado, should we treat these new arrivals as mere POSSLQs living in sin?
Our legislature has also decided that marriages between first cousins are repugnant Colorado morals.
But these marriages were legal in our neighbor to the south, New Mexico. Doubtless some of those couples moved to Colorado after their wedding. Have their marriages ever been called into question? Not to my knowledge.
Nor have I ever heard of any family-values pickets when
the one-time Republican presidential candidate Marion
Pat
Robertson appeared in Colorado; his Virginia
parents were first cousins, and could not have gotten
married in this state.
So, even if we Coloradans, acting through our
legislature, believe that certain unions are immoral and do
not deserve the sanction of law, we haven't gone out of our
way to outlaw these marriages if they occur in other
states. Nor did those states which were strict about
divorces make any announcements like Those wanton
hedonists in Nevada may have given you a divorce, but as
far as we're concerned here, you're still married.
The full faith and credit
clause of the federal
constitution has generally worked to prevent such problems,
even though the moral sensibilities of various states
differ considerably.
But there have been problems, long before gay marriage
was an issue. Go back to 1856, when the Republicans, then a
regional third party, first organized for a presidential
election. The platform railed against the twin pillars
of barbarism -- slavery and polygamy.
Both have ample approval in the Bible, and the Mormons were openly practicing the latter in Utah. If Utah were to become a state, and some patriarch had a dozen legal wives there and desired to move to the richer farms of Iowa, would that state be forced to recognize the marriage?
After all, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution which gives the federal government the power to regulate marriages.
In the Utah case, the Republicans in congress solved the
problem by refusing to admit Utah to the union until its
state constitution, which had to be approved by Congress,
banned polygamy. And while Utah was a territory, it was
under direct federal control, so the feds sent out agents
to hunt down cohabs
and imprison them.
It does seem odd now that Utah, a state which appears to be a hotbed of traditional family values, was once considered a licentious den of iniquity and perversion.
But it is against that background that we have to consider the Hawaii gay-marriage issue. It should be lots of fun, since it has everything -- traditional values, state rights, federal powers, hot-button political issues -- that we need for monster of a national controversy over a meaningless issue.
Meaningless? Absolutely. Suppose the gay couple down the street can get legally married in Hawaii. Does that take money from my pocket? Does it restrict my liberties?
But all this furor over Hawaii means that millions of Americans will focus their attention on that, rather than the things that do take money and restrict liberties. Score another one for the corporate Christian right.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1996 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >