On their wedding day, turned away by NC magistrates

[struggle4progress]

BY CAROL ANN PERSON

I met the love of my life more than 40 years ago in Raleigh. Thomas is a lifelong North Carolinian. I was a recent transplant from Vermont. We are both legally blind, and soon after we met, we moved to Winston-Salem to work for the Industries of the Blind. Our friendship blossomed into love, and in 1976, Thomas proposed. I very happily said yes.

Soon after, we went to our local courthouse to receive a civil marriage license from one of the magistrates there, so we could commit our lives to each through a legal union. I was so excited. People always say your wedding day is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life, and I was expecting mine to be exactly that.

But when we walked into that government office together, we were told that the magistrate on duty wouldn’t give us a marriage license. I was flabbergasted. We had planned everything, we had all our paperwork and we were legally eligible to get married.

So why wouldn’t he marry us? The reason, it turned out, was because Thomas is African-American, and I am white. The magistrate told us that marrying an interracial couple went against his religious beliefs ...

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article22949817.html

[struggle4progress]

1. North Carolina May Soon Let Clerks Refuse Marriage Licenses to Gay and Interracial Couples

By Mark Joseph Stern

... At first glance, the North Carolina bill might seem pretty similar to the anti-gay “religious liberty” measure recently passed in Indiana. It uses the same language about protecting individuals’ religious objections, and it arose out of the same concern that spurred the Indiana law: the arrival of same-sex marriage in the state through judicial fiat.

But that’s where the similarities end. North Carolina’s bill is actually far more radical than Indiana’s, a dramatic expansion of civil servants’ right to inflict discrimination on others with the full endorsement of the government. The Indiana law allowed “compelling governmental interests” to trump religious exercise—but the North Carolina bill has no such upper limit. In effect, the bill declares that protecting civil servants’ right to discriminate on the job is more important than anything else. All a magistrate need do under the bill is declare that she holds a religious objection to issuing a marriage license to a certain couple, and she can legally turn them away.

It gets worse. In an obvious effort to avoid seeing the law struck down as unconstitutional anti-gay discrimination, the North Carolina legislature couched their bill in the broadest terms possible. A magistrate isn’t just empowered to turn away same-sex couples—he can turn away any couple, so long as he can articulate a religious objection to their marriage. That gives racist magistrates an excellent opportunity to refuse to marry interracial couples. The Virginia trial judge who forced Mildred and Richard Loving to leave their state or go to jail, after all, grounded his ruling in religious beliefs ...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/02/north_carolina_law_lets_magistrates_refuse_marriage_licenses_to_gay_and.html

[cbayer]

2. The more things change the more the stay the same.

[struggle4progress]

3. "I can't marry you two unless you promise not to use birth control pills"

"I can't marry you two because you would take your sick kids to a doctor instead of praying"

"I can't marry you two because Christians shouldn't marry Jews"

"I can't marry you two because a college-educated woman can never be a good wife"

[AtheistCrusader]

4. At long last, do you then understand why I do not share your optimism for

Progress under these existing religious institutions and the dogma they promulgate?

[cbayer]

5. I've never not understood why you don't share my optimism, lol.

But this article shows that things do change despite existing religious institutions d their dogma, so I'm even more optimistic.!