More fallout about gay marriage

[magid]

According to this story from the Houston Chronicle,

"The Social Security Administration is rejecting marriage documents issued for heterosexual couples in four communities that performed weddings for gay couples earlier this year.


The agency is rejecting all marriage certificates issued in New Paltz, N.Y., after Feb. 27, when the town's mayor began marrying gay couples, according to town officials.

Certificates issued during the brief periods when Asbury Park, N.J.; Multnomah County, Ore.; and Sandoval County, N.M., recognized gay marriages also are being rejected."

I guess this is how gay marriage is a threat to heterosexual marriage?
*fume*

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

Sounds like some kind of bureaucratic fuck-up to me. I notice that there hasn't been any comment from the SSA yet.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I hope it's just a screw-up.

Still, I'd think it easier to have some kind of flow like:
male & female? accept
if male & male or female & female, is it from MA? if yes, accept

This is obviously flagging certain jurisdictions, which have to be tagged or coded or something in some way, which takes deliberation.

[queue.livejournal.com]

My reading of the article is that this was being done at the local offices, so it's not any kind of tagging or coding or whatever.

My other thought: if those places used modified marriage applications in order to get around the "man's name, woman's name" thing, it could be argued that those marriages are not valid, regardless of the gender of the people involved, since the proper, approved forms were not used.

In any case, I'll be very interested to see what the SSA has to say about this.

You know, I was thinking this morning, in regards to another story, about how responsible it is to report something when you only have one side of it. I mean, this SSA story was released on a Sunday. It might have been pretty difficult to get in touch with someone at the SSA over the weekend. Would it have been better to wait at least one business day to get a comment? Because some people are going to read this story today, it makes it look like the SSA is doing something really stupid, and then they'll ignore any further stories on the issue, since they already read this one. And then it turns out that it was just some kind of snafu, but many people never find out about it. I dunno.

[hyounpark.livejournal.com]

The SSA website says flat-out (http://policy.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0100203200):

Do not accept any marriage documents as evidence of identity issued by the following jurisdictions during the respective timeframes, as follows:

Sandoval County, New Mexico, on 02/20/04;
New Paltz, New York, on or after 02/27/04;
Multnomah County, Oregon, on 03/03/04 through 04/20/04;
Asbury Park, New Jersey, on 03/08/04 through 03/10/04.

Seems pretty specific for a bureaucratic oversight.

Specificly,
Hyoun

[queue.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. Note the item just above that:

From February 12, 2004 through March 11, 2004, San Francisco City and County issued marriage certificates to same-sex couples and locally modified the marriage license applications and marriage certificates.

Due to the unresolved legal status of these locally modified same-sex marriage documents, do not accept same-sex marriage documents issued by San Francisco City and County during the specified time period.

The locally modified form, which is in the form of a marriage document labeled “License and Certificate of Marriage”, refers to members of the same-sex couple as “1st Applicant” and “2nd Applicant.” Do not accept marriage documents issued by San Francisco City and County with the terminology “1st Applicant” and “2nd Applicant.”

NOTE: Marriage documents with “Groom” and “Bride”, and “Husband” and “Wife” that are issued to opposite-sex couples are acceptable documents for purposes of establishing evidence of identity as long as the document meets the criteria described in RM 00203.200 E.

That seems to support my theory above about modified documents, since SF apparently only modified the applications for same-sex applicants. It seems plausible that the 4 localities specified might have modified all applications during those times.

Still seems like a dumb thing to do on the part of the SSA (or whoever gave them the order), though.

[danger-chick.livejournal.com]

Can you imagine poly applications?

Groom1:______________
Groom2:______________
...
GroomX:______________

Bride1:______________
Bride2:______________
...
BrideY:______________

[queue.livejournal.com]

No, it would be, "Please affix additional Ammendment P-10 forms as necessary."

Heh.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Or,
Spouse 1: __________
Spouse 2: __________
...
Spouse N: __________

(If the SSA accepts that sort of form by then, of course!)

[danger-chick.livejournal.com]

I think trying to legislate poly marriages would be nearly impossible. What would happen if you decided to divorce some, but not all, of the partcipants.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Definitely a whole 'nother ball game, that would require a completely different way of thinking about marriage. N people could be in a group marriage, as in your situation above, or it could be that it would be a pairwise situation, with people not limited to one marriage each. I see some people in 'triangles' (three pairwise marriages), but others are in 'Vs', in which case there would be two marriages, with the other side of that triangle in whatever non-state-sanctioned relationship.

Tricky, all around.