In North Carolina, United Church of Christ Sues to Demand Right to Solemnize Gay Marriages

Did you know North Carolina has
a law on the books that that makes it a misdemeanor for a minister
to solemnize the wedding of any couple who doesn’t have a valid
marriage license from the state? That it is illegal in the state to
even perform this ceremony of words and hymns and vows that isn’t
even recognized as a valid contract without the state’s stamp of
approval anyway?

Perhaps its origins are from some sort of attempt to prevent
fraud by some reprobate phony trying to make money off the naïve
who didn’t realize how many hoops they had to jump through to truly
make a marriage legal.

In any event, North Carolina was the last state to pass a
constitutional ban on same-sex recognition in 2012, before the bans
started falling apart in other states. The United Church of Christ
is now suing,
arguing that the amendment, combined with the state’s existing
statutes criminalizing unlicensed weddings, is a violation of the
church’s First Amendment rights.
From the Associated Press:

“North Carolina’s marriage laws are a direct affront to freedom
of religion,” said the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, executive minister
with the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, which is a
plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We feel that it is important that any
person that comes into community life of a United Church of Christ
congregation be afforded equal pastoral care and equal opportunity
to religious services that clergy provide.”

But in North Carolina, clergy are often faced with a troubling
decision — “whether to provide those services or break the law,”
Guess said. “That’s something no clergy member should be faced
with.”

Along with the United Church of Christ, which has more than 1
million parishioners, a dozen clergy members and same-sex couples
who want to marry were listed as plaintiffs. The defendants
included North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper and several
county district attorneys as well as five registers of deeds.

Some of the reporting is a bit ambiguous and suggests the
constitutional
amendment passed in 2012 is what turned the solemnization into
a crime. That’s not exactly the case. There’s no criminal element
to the ban on same-sex marriage. It just says the state won’t
recognize them. The problem comes from two
already
existing statutes:

No minister, officer, or any other person authorized to
solemnize a marriage under the laws of this State shall perform a
ceremony of marriage between a man and woman, or shall declare them
to be husband and wife, until there is delivered to that person a
license for the marriage of the said persons, signed by the
register of deeds of the county in which the marriage license was
issued or by a lawful deputy or assistant. There must be at least
two witnesses to the marriage ceremony.

And:

Every minister, officer, or any other person authorized to
solemnize a marriage under the laws of this State, who marries any
couple without a license being first delivered to that person, as
required by law, or after the expiration of such license, or who
fails to return such license to the register of deeds within 10
days after any marriage celebrated by virtue thereof, with the
certificate appended thereto duly filled up and signed, shall
forfeit and pay two hundred dollars ($200.00) to any person who
sues therefore, and shall also be guilty of a Class 1
misdemeanor.

It would seem like these two statutes were always a violation of
a church’s or minister’s freedom of speech, regardless of the sexes
of the participants. I could easily see the courts striking down
the two statutes while leaving the ban on gay marriage recognition
intact, meaning that it would no longer be a crime for a church to
perform a gay marriage (or any other type of marriage); the state
just wouldn’t recognize it as a legal contract.