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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7387)	3/2/2004 2:02:35 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

Of the couples married in LA, are they legally married for federal law purposes? My recollection is that DOMA handled that. IF DOMA isn't found unconstitutional. Hasn't been tested yet because there has been no gay marriage to test it. Once there are gay married couples, they will test DOMA. And there's a good chance that it will be found to violate the Equal Protection clause. Which can only be fixed by a Constitutional Amendment. That would be a better argument if the mess were unmanageable and non-constructive and the alternatives not so unpalatable. Well, the mess may not be totally unmanageable, but it will be pretty bad. Take one example. California goes ahead and allows gay marrige. A gay couple married in Ca accumulates some property there which is community property under their laws, moves to New York where they don't have community property and accumulates some property in the name of one of the parties, then comes to Washington, another community property state, and accumulates more property. Then they split up and one files for divorce. Does Washington let the filing go through, though they aren't married under our laws? If not, and the answer is probably not though who knows, what does Washington do about the property they have accumulated. We have laws on meretricious relationships for opposite sex couples who act as though they were married but aren't (it's called a meretricious relationship), but those parallel the marital statutes so wouldn't be applicable if they couldn't legally be married. Their California community property isn't recognized by us as CP. The NY property can't be split as quasi-CP property since there's no marriage. And that doesn't even begin to consider what would happen if they were a lesbian couple and one of them had a child. That issue is still very much undecided, and woudld ve even more so if they were legally married in Ca when they had the child but not legally married when they chose to break up. Trust me, it would be a mess. A lot of lawyers will make a lot of money out of this. Which, of course, would be a good thing if I weren't retiring! <g>