aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Gay marriage: a tie that binds

You’ve got to love this. In those states where we can get married, if we move out of state, we can’t get divorced. Or something like that…

Try following this, from MSNBC:

Gay couples had to struggle mightily to win the right to marry or form civil unions in certain states. Now, some are finding that breaking up is hard to do, too.

In Rhode Island, for example, the state’s top court ruled in December that gays married in neighboring Massachusetts - the only state to allow the practice - cannot get divorced because state lawmakers have never defined marriage as anything but a union between a man and woman.

In Missouri, a judge is deciding whether a lesbian married in Massachusetts can get an annulment. [...]

Over the past four years, Massachusetts has been the only state where gay marriage is legal, while nine other states allow gay couples to enter into civil unions or domestic partnerships that offer many of the rights and privileges of marriage. The vast majority of these unions require court action to dissolve.

Gay couples who still live in the state where they partnered can split up with little difficulty; the laws in those states include divorce or dissolution procedures for same-sex couples. But gay couples who have moved to another state are running into trouble.

Massachusetts, at least early on, let out-of-state gay couples get married there practically for the asking. But the rules governing divorce are stricter. Out-of-state couples could go back to Massachusetts to get divorced, but they would have to live there for a year to establish residency first. [...]

Getting a divorce could prove toughest in some of the 40 states that have explicitly banned or limited same-sex unions, lawyers say.

In Missouri, which banned gay marriage in 2001, a conservative lawmaker has urged a judge not to grant an annulment to a lesbian married in Massachusetts.