Decrying its “smelly origins”, Gov. Patrick says he’d repeal the 1913 law forbidding marriages to be performed for out-of-staters whose marriages wouldn’t be legal in their home state. IOW, marriage is marriage.
Sal DiMasi says yep.
Are we there yet? Anyone know the whip figures for the legislature yet? Is it a slam dunk?
De-Romneyfying Massachusetts continues. Life is good.
Please share widely!
Finally, let’s get marriage equality right on the Massachusetts end. It’ll be more difficult federally, but this is a definite step in the right direction. Right now, marriage equality is a misnomer at best, so hopefully people will realize that with these kinds of stories and call their legislators to get on this right away. Honestly, this should be very fast legislation.
The Legislature had it in their grasp to repeal this years ago, and chose not to do so. Arlene et al decided to go to court again instead of that pesky going on the record thing the Lege seems to like, and were stunned when they lost the case, as they apparently thought that the SJC handed out decisions based on political instead of legal reasons.
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The 1913 law ‘frenzy’ is a fraud – these marriages could have been recorded years ago if legislators had the guts to vote instead of hide.
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BTW – nice move, Deval. As Chief Law Enforcement officer of the commonwealth, you direct clerks to break the law instead of wait for repeal. Sort of like your story that you didn’t KNOW about the SJC decision when you wre calling legislators and telling them to adjourn the ConCon. What’s your excuse this time?
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I suspect it has most to do with the recent change in leadership in the legislature. Brings different perspectives and priorities to the fore. In point of fact, you can’t really equate one legislature in time with another, from a time ago…
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The remaining portions of your post, I’m sorry to have to tell you, are incoherent. If you wish answers to those collections of words which you’ve placed ahead of the question mark, you’ll have to unwind them and ask again. If, on the other hand, the question mark is mere rhetorical devices -the passive underlining the agressive, so to speak- you will still have to unwind the meaning behind the paragraphs and try again.
And I resent the implication that there is any passivity to my agression, Dr. Freud. The Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the Commonwalth has instructed town clerks to flout the law; this time, he cannot claim ignorance of a court decision. I am interested to hear his excuse.
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Are those words small enough for you?
…flouting going on!!! This is a statute of administrative effect that was wholly overlooked for decades and activated for political purposes. The SJC held that the law was not offensive to the Constitution of the Commonwealth but you should also note that they did not hold that the regulation had to be enforced. None of this matters of course, because Patrick has not even offended the statute with his actions. Instructing his employees to register the marriages in question in the public record does not offend the law since they can still be declared null and void regardless of the facts that they are being added to the books. The directive not to record the marriages was an executive order propagated under the statute to affect the previous administration’s will. Patrick is completely within his authority as executive of the Commonwealth to instruct that these marriages be entered into the record, because recording an ineffective marriage is not illegal and you will note, there is not a record keeping aspect to the statute:
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No marriage shall be contracted in this commonwealth by a party residing and intending to continue to reside in another jurisdiction if such marriage would be void if contracted in such other jurisdiction, and every marriage contracted in this commonwealth in violation hereof shall be null and void. Mass. Gen. L. ch. 207, § 11
And since when does the SJC give opinions that yes, it is the law, but don’t obey it unless you feel like it?
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On that basis, should any gay marriage licenses have been issued in the first place?
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Romney abided by ALL of the SJC decisions; Patrick seems to want to pick and choose.
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And ALL of this would be hypothetical if the bill to repeal the law had been filed, instead of running to the sympathetic (?) curthouse once again.
there are no such thing. there are only marriage licenses. so no, no gay marriage licenses were ever issued.
There is just marriage.
…the licenses should or should not have been issued is moot since having a marriage license alone doesn’t give the marriage legal effect and if you read the statute again carefully you will note it says nothing about licenses.
Adn the SJC gave an opinion just like the one you describe in the “up or down vote on the marriage amendment” decision, so it sure does happen. No matter, however, since my point about them not insisting that the law be enforced was hyperbole. My point actually was and still is that Patrick has not broken the law. The SCJ did not say that ineffective marriages cannot be recorded in the public record.
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Patrick has not broken any law or disobeyed any SJC decision by instructing that the marriages in question be put on the books.
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Interesting how you ignore this point. You can take swipes at citizens exercising their privilege to petition the courts all day long and criticize the previous legislature’s inaction all through the night but people get to petition the courts, Patrick has broken no laws and the legislature is now motivated to act. What exactly, then, is your issue?
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Is it your contention that the Governor is breaking no laws by instructing clerks to knowingly record vital statistics that are null and void?
seems to me you’re sidestepping the larger topic, which is repeal of this odeous law.
….my contention, it is the plain truth of the matter. If Governor Patrick feels that certain statistics that may not be legally valid on their face are nonetheless important enough to warrant entry into the public record it is his right to do so and he is not breaking the law.
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Please provide a citation to the law being broken if you disagree. You may find it imprudent, it may even offend your sense of administrative decorum, but that does not make it illegal.
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…have to do with the person recording the improper certificate enforcing the fines and jail time. I wonder if they will be fining those who knowingly solmnized improper marriages?
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And the penalty for the recording clerks is a fine as well, for knowingly being complicit in a false stateent.
…if the Governor has ordered the record. It is only false if the clerk records information they know to be fraudulent or incorrect. The Governor has ordered that the information be recorded, it is his order that makes the record permissible and valid, so no false information is being recorded. I know you reallllly want there to be a gotcha in this, but there just isn’t. Gov. Patrick thinks that these marriage cetificates belong in the record and until the SJC tells him to take them out (which I don’t believe they would) he has done nothing wrong. By the time the law suit to compel gets to a court room the law will be repealed and it will be moot.
…IF he had waited for the repeal, they might ahve been considered moot. Now, with his grandstanding, Patrick is challanging VoteOnMarriage et al to issue a court challange, and these people COULD be victimized, if the court rules they WERE improperly solemnized, for the greater glory of Deval.
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Way to go!
….to be victimized? There is no basis to pull them into a suit. A state agency would be sued and the worst that could happen is a court instructing that the certificates be taken out of the register which puts them in exactly the place they started since they weren’t in there in the first place. The only harm here is to your political sensibility, which is fine – I go on and on about my political sensibility all the time, I just don’t equate offending it with illegal action when none actually exists.
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As I’m certain you are interested in hearing the “excuse” (sic) of the previous administrations spanning the 74 (seventy-four) years of relative inaction on this particular law? Or where you just as righteously indignant when Mitt
used it as blatantly a PR stunt as you now alledge of Patrick?
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You’ll note, I pray, that I requested clarity, not minutia nore indeed made mention of size of any kind; neither small, medium, large nor extra-large… That is, indeed, aggression well underlined by passivity…
Demonstrate that enforcement of this law, well known to town clerks, was unenforced.
After all, it is very difficult to prove a negative. Far easier would it be for you to identify one single case where this law was enforced in the last fifty years.
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Face it, this is like the law requiring you to have a gun on Boston Common in case of bears.
….definitive proof that the law was totally inactive, but since it was written in 1913 the only recorded legal case regarding it was Cote-Whitacre v. Dept. of Public Health, which of course was the post Goodridge challenge, wheareas Section 10 on the legality of foreign marriages has been adjudicated on regularly for most of its existence.
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Demonstrate that it was well known to town clerks.
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http://www.mass.gov/…
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Again with the putting words in my mouth. Don’t do that. I said “relative inaction” which is, at best, a very distant relation to enforcement/unenforcement.
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The law languished for many years. Romney dusted it off to score PR points. Deval Patrick supports repeal of the law (which, BTW, is good PR). End of discussion.
…demonstrated any such thing. The supermarket where I shop has signs that say 12 items or less but they don’t enforce it. You have demonstrated that clerks have to post a sign, nothing more.
….this is what you said –
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As demonstrated above, the law did not languish, but was enforced by the Board of Health.
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And it was in response to an assertion about the 1913 law, not the regulation about posting impediments to marriage.
PS – I respect you, too and that is NOT snarky.
…it is amongst the impediments, but posting a sign is not the same thing as enforcement, so you can demonstrate with the statute you provided that their was probably a sign posted in most clerks offices, but you cannot demonstrate that any of the impediments were actively enforced. Posting a sign is not dispositive of enforcement.
I know this isn’t the central issue, but just wait for the flood of first-cousin marriages! I believe only a minority of states (including MA) allow such marriages. I know that Vermont allows them, but not between people who seek to evade the laws of their home state.
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Do I know all this because I have a first cousin that is HOT (but flighty, alas)? Perhaps. And of course that ship has sailed; I’m very happily married to a non-cousin.
…this is not an aside, it is a indirect attack on the credibility of same sex marriages and it is ridiculous.
It was an honest attempt to be funny, but apparently this issue is too charged to tolerate lame jokes.
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I brought the 1st cousin issue up b/c I remember when applying for my marriage license in VT (no ID required) reading about the first cousin stuff (specifically that you can’t marry your first cousin in VT if your home state doesn’t allow it).
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This article discusses how there is no strong rational for prohibiting 1st cousin marriage. It’s largely a historical artifact in the US.
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But I’m going to abandon this line of conversation; I have no need to be branded a troll.
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Cheers.
…wasn’t obvious to me, sorry. I rescind my comment labeling your post as an attack because that is clearly not how you meant it.
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As difficult to resist as I’m sure it was, this hamhanded slime of the previous governor deflated completely any cogency from the rest of your post.
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Obviously Governor Romney was not involved in the enactment of the 1913 law under discussion. Any attempt to associate him with its purported racist underpinnings is simply ignorant.
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He invoked the statute to prevent Massachusetts from becoming a mecca for same sex marriages.
It was the only tool at his disposal to make it clearly understood that, although you can buy it here, you can’t take it home with you. And repealing the law for PR purposes will in no way alter the fact that these marriages remain illegal in the other 49 states.
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I’m sure that there are some real topics on which you can disagree with Mitt Romney, his beliefs, and his policies.
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Gratuitous, throw-away smear lines like the above may seem very clever at the moment, but they usually detract from any real credibility that the poster might otherwise have.
for his presidential run. He’s totally fair game.
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No one had ever evoked the law, not even for the racist purpose it was created for, but Mitt…he’s a class act. He LIKES to hurt people.
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Screw ’em. He did it only for political gain to get in bed with the jerkoffs who think being gay is a choice you make instead of something you are. I have no sympathy for him, or the horse he rode out on.
Why send all that cash offshore? AMerican couples forced to go abroad to marry have been spending their wedding cash elsewhere. The MA economy has been wasting a leucrative opportunity. Massachusetts businesses ranging from limo companies to photographers to musicians to wedding planners to florists to hotieliers and caterers should be organizing and pushing for the repeal of this law, because they will be the major beneficiarie$. And don’t forget that a slice of any out of state money spent in MA will go into the MA state tax pot. Repealing the 1913 law makes good business sense for Massachusetts.
“Then it’s settled. We shall legalize gay money. I mean gay marriage.”
lefty lowell, you’re wrong when you state that the 1913 law was created for racist reasons. interracial marriage has been legal in Massachusetts since 1830, long before the emancipation proclamation.
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the notion that in 1913 it occurred to the legislature that oh, no, an interracial couple from Mississip’ might come here and try to get married under our liberal laws. we can’t let that happen. we have to do whatever is possible to protect our redneck brothers’ ability to restrict interracial marriage. quick pass this into law. whew! someone tell the hooded solons in jackson what we just did for them.
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haven’t you noticed that the globe backed off of that contention long ago? someone with access to lexis/nexus should do a check and see how many times between 2004 and 2005 the globe wrote about the 1913 law and erroneously, misleadingly -but typically- linked the two.
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Someone gave them religion about a year ago and they haven’t linked the two since.
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But lefty lowell brings it up, same as this governor, who is quoted in the herald decrying its “smelly origins” and “questionable legisltaive history.”
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Enough already. Repeal the law so massachusetts CAN become a haven for gay marriage. it will be good for the Bay State if it becomes known as the Gay State, the place for same-sex couples to get married.
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But stop it already with the unneccessary linking of interracial marriage and the 1913 law.
So it’s just a coincidence that this law was enacted in 1913, just shortly after an anti-miscegenation Amendment to the US Constitution was introduced, but failed and state legislatures all over the Country were enacting anti-miscegenation laws of their own.
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Just an accident of history that these events happened at the same time, I guess.
…tell history is mostly silent as to why this law was actually written. It should, however, be noted that at the time black boxer Jack Johnson’s inter-racial marriage was a national scandal and that just two years before the 1913 law was enacted an Anti-Miscegenation Bill was filed in the House of Representatives in Washington and there was a flurry of state action banning inter-racial marriage going on in much of the nation. It has been suggested that this was MA’s answer to that environment. May or may not be true, but you can no more prove that it wasn’t.
Why is it so important to you to ‘de-link’ the law and the racism that may, or may not, be behind it? Your post is very strident, but you give no reason for this… It would be one thing for there to be very concrete evidence that this law is, or is not, legislative bigotry, but you cite no such evidence.
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The law is, at best, ‘smelly’ and there is no way around it.
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My personal feeling is that the law as created then and as used now, is meant as a sort of two-faced NIMBY attitude: ‘we’re forced by the courts to accept it here, but we’ll be
darned if we either like it or import it…”
Here are the briefs of the Cote-Whitacre lawsuit. Enjoy perusing what indications of original intent the plaintiffs were able to dig up in the records that remain:
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http://www.glad.org/…
http://www.glad.org/…
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It was transparently a law emanating from the Jack Johnson story. I’d buy that it wasn’t introduced for reasons of outright racism, even though it was probably passed for that reason, but to avoid fights with Southern states for the time being. (After all, our little tussle with South Carolina after the Preston Brooks-Charlie Sumner incident got a little out of hand in late 1860/early 1861…in 1913 quite a few of the combatants were still alive.) But yes, that law is long overdue for repeal- since the Loving verdict, at least.
…acting as if this is an attempt to right a civil wrong. it’s a sticky loophole that needs to be repealed in order for massachusetts to become the mecca for gay marriage. and that is the only reason for repealing it.
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again, massachusetts legalized interracial marriage long before the civil war and was always welcoming to freemen and escaped or former slaves.
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trying to make it seem like the anti-miscegenation wave that was sweeping across the country is connected to his is ludicrous. if that were the case, they would’ve made it illegal for massachusetts residents to marry interracially.
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i’m intrigued by the need of some people in our community to make these issues seem linked inextricably. they’re not.
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the future of massachusetts is as the mecca for gay marriage. it will be good for the economy and good everyone in massachusetts, gay, straight, etc.
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we can repeal this law without the smokescreen and tell it like it is: an economic development decision.
i agree with you that repealing this law will be good for MA economically, as i’ve stated above. however that does not mean that the repeal can’t also be seen as something completely different: a statement by MA that the state rejects the notion that it should police the marriage choices made by people from other states. finally, i disagree with you that marriage equality is the only reason for repealing this law. you may argue as to why it was written in the first place, but you will probably agree taht is wasn’t to prevent gay marriage. but because of the way it was written, it could be used for that almost 100 years later (where’s EaBo defending “original intent” now?!). this raises the question, if it is left on the books, in what ugly and unforseen way will it be used to discriminate again in the future? no, it needs to go, if for nothing else as a statement that MA will not tolerate leaving a law to lie in wait to discriminate against some other minority in the unforseen future.
….MA had permitted inter-racial marriage previous to the 1913 statute does not mean that in 1913 legilative forces did not wish to curtail its spreading to other states (sounds a bit like a recent governor I can think of). I can’t prove that there was a racist motivation but neither can you disprove it and historians, while in some disagreement, submit that anti-miscegination sentiment was likely a motivating factor.
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Well… it is an attempt to right a civil wrong, just not one that (according to you) stems from the ‘original intent’ of the writers of the law. I can’t deny the possibility as easily as you, however, because a significant amount of circumstantial evidence exists suggesting a clear link with anti-miscegenation laws, which were prevalent nationwide. .
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I think you are eliding the difficulties and tribulations of that time. Strictly speaking, Massachusetts never ‘legalized’ interracial marriage directly. An earlier (1705) anti- miscegenation law was repealed in the 1840’s, just prior to the civil war. That repeal was the culmination of a decade long lobbying effort by abolitionists to repeal the law, mostly for symbolic reasons, and with little real effect. (Massachusetts being the only state to repeal pre-civil war. Other states didn’t repeal until much later, some not until the 1960’s when they were forced to do so by the Supreme court decision in Loving v. Virginia which finally, flatly, stated that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.)
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On the question of whether the Commonwealth was as ‘welcoming to freemen and escaped or former slaves’, I’m afraid I don’t see it. In 1855. Massachusetts did pass a so-called ‘personal liberty’ law, in direct refutation of the fugitive slave law of 1850, but this is hardly ‘long before the Civil War’… and while certainly Massachusetts could be called civilized and indeed even Christian in it’s general view of slavery when compared to other states, one has only to read Thoreau from 1854 to glimpse the turmoil and conflicted state of the Commonwealth.
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It is also worth noting that in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin while living in Maine (A state created, in the then recent past, out of Massachusetts by a compromise over slavery) By her own words, the book derived from an awakening sense of injustice born of clerical and social support for the fugitive slave act of 1850. I would hardly call that ‘welcoming.’
…I’ll just let you know, I would prefer that they not repeal the 1913 law.
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Why?
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Because the 1913 law reduces the likelihood of an anti-same-sex marriage amendment to the federal constitution. It really is as simple as that.
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If a same-sex couple wants to be married in Massachusetts, they can very well move to Massachuestts. If a same-sex couple wants to have a ceremony in Massachusetts, that’s fine; it’s not exactly clear what the ceremony might signify from a legal standpoint, but they can feel free to do so.
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But this lil’ queer boy doesn’t want to have the state of Massachusetts do something that might upset the applecart at the federal level. Not just yet. The time is not yet ripe, but it’s coming.
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On a more serious note (the above was quite serious by the way, but in an informal style) DPatrick was quite correct in alleviating the clerks of the cities and towns of the responsibility of determining the marriage laws of the states of residence of people who want to marry in Massachusetts. That should be, at this point in time, as far as it goes.
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The exchange between Anthony and Ms. Porcupine above was quite interesting. Anthony was quite correct, of course, but I’ll merely point out two more things. One Romney’s order required the clerks of the cities and towns to try to interpret the marriage laws of any non-Mass-resident. That was, of course, a nightmare. The city and town clerks resisted that.
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Two, the state of Massachusetts records a same sex marriage? What does that mean when one wants to have his or her marriage right enforced elsewhere? Not clear, is it. Record the marriage in the Massachusetts state records (marriage in den USofA is at the state level) and let the states figure it out.
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Good luck, since so much of the USofA is Jesusland.
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*Just to let the children among us know, this “queer boy” is a takeoff on a song from a recent John Waters’s album.
any “worse” than allowing them to marry in Canada, Netherlands, South Africa etc., which has been happening for some time now? If 38 states had already passed anti-equality constitutional amendments, then I’d ne more concerned that they’d be ready to ratify a federal amendment. But that’s not where things stand. We pretty much have the hater states on record now as such, and not even a Repub controlled congress with a hater president behind it could get an amendment through either house. It would be foolish not to consider what you’re concerned with, but I don’t think a federal amendment is the main concern. To me, the biggest concern is someone going to the Supreme COurt prematurely.
People can go through whatever ceremony they like. The issue isn’t the ceremony. The issue is the legal repercussions that result from the ceremony*. Those are two separate and distinct issues.
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*Here in Germany, a couple is not married unless they present themselves before a government official in a town hall. They have the option of having a “church ceremony” but the “church ceremony” alone does not a marriage make. From a legal standpoint, of course.
…out-of-state people can go through the ceremony in Massachusetts. The legal implications of their having gone through the ceremony will become evident when the out-of-state people return to their home states.
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The interesting question, which I did not mention, will arise when a Massachusetts same sex couple, duly and properly married in Massachusetts, moves to another state (I don’t know why they might want to) and seeks to have their marriage rights enforced in the other state. That hasn’t happened. Yet.
what i’m saying is that gay US couples have already married in MA and in Candada and then moved to other places and sought to have their marriages recognized. so what you fear will happen if MA allowes out of staters to marry in MA is already happening. so might as well let gay couples have the same freedom to marry in MA as any other couple in the nation, because the cat you’re concerned about is already out of the bag. and btw, why the snide remark about wondering why married gay couples could ever possibly want to move from MA? you are in germany right now, are you not? are you consdered married while there? i don’t think so.
yes, it’s legal there. but to think that every US couple has the luxury of staying within the confines of MA is ludicrous. jobs frequently make people move – sometimes out of MA.
I would rather the issue be raised AFTER we settle the amendment question, one way or another, in the ConCon or in the ballot.
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Lifting a ban that does not directly affect the lives of any citizen of the Commonwealth living within its boundaries would be short-sighted and just adds fuel to the fire.
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I bet some (anti-marriage equality folks, either Dem or Rep) know this, and this is why they are pushing to lift the ban. Which once again, colludes with the idealistic left. The dynamics are SO similar to the whole ‘direct vote’ question that was raised during the ConCon.
Why is The Governor of Mass. wasting time with symbolic gestures while Boston’s crime rate continues to climb unabated?
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Why is the City Council President busy protesting the war and supporting the repeal of the 1913 law while Menino is claiming “There is no crisis here!” referring to the recent homicide spree?
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Why aren’t any of them denouncing and standing up to the unions who refuse to allow traffic detail cops be moved to crime prevention and neighborhood patrol?
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Priories!
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Well duh! You’d be wasting time too if all you had working for you were stooges. Sheesh! You answered your own question…
An interesting theory …
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Like I said, typos are funny.