That is part of the problem. Our government is secular. It requires a marriage license and has laws regarding married couples, children and survivorship. Aside from that it doesn't care if people are married in a $100K Church wedding, $20 at the County Clerk office or in a ceremony involving beheading a chicken and drinking its blood. Gays have been getting married for years. The problem was the US government wasn't recognizing those marriages thus denying them the same rights and benefits under the law as married straight couples.
Kentucky judge says it well
Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, defines marriage as follows:
"A state of being married, or being united to a person or persons of the opposite sex as husband or wife; also, the mutual relation of husband and wife; wedlock; abstractly, the institution whereby men and women are joined in a special kind of social and legal dependence, for the purpose of founding and maintaining a family."
The Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia defines marriage as:
"The legal union of a man with a woman for life; the state or condition of being married; the legal relation of spouses to each other; wedlock; the formal declaration or contract by which a man and a woman join in wedlock."
Black's Law Dictionary, Fourth Edition, defines marriage as:
"The civil status, condition or relation of one man and one woman united in law for life, for the discharge to each other and the community of the duties legally incumbent upon those whose association is founded on the distinction of sex."
Kentucky statutes do not specifically prohibit marriage between persons of the same sex1 nor do they authorize the issuance of a marriage license to such persons.
1
KRS 402.020(5) and KRS 402.210 do contain references to the male and female of the species.
Marriage was a custom long before the state commenced to issue licenses for that purpose. For a time the records of marriage were kept by the church. Some states even now recognize a common-law marriage which has neither the benefit of license nor clergy. In all cases, however, marriage has always been considered as the union of a man and a woman and we have been presented with no authority to the contrary.
It appears to us that appellants are prevented from marrying, not by the statutes of Kentucky or the refusal of the County Court Clerk of Jefferson County to issue them a license, but rather by their own incapability of entering into a marriage as that term is defined.
A license to enter into a status or a relationship which the parties are incapable of achieving is a nullity. If the appellants had concealed from the clerk the fact that they were of the same sex and he had issued a license to them and a ceremony had been performed, the resulting relationship would not constitute a marriage.
Jones v. Hallahan, 501 S.W.2d 588 | Casetext
