It’s a cliché image but one that is steeped in generations of tradition: A probate judge is awakened in the middle of the night to perform a hurried marriage ceremony for a couple of lovebirds. That’s not the way it happens these days, of course, but an Alabama bill awaiting a vote in the House this legislative session would put an end to probate judges even issuing marriage licenses, much less performing wedding ceremonies.
Senate Bill (SB) 143, sponsored by Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Bay Minette, was first floated in 2015 in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling calling for equal treatment for same-sex couples seeking to marry. Some Alabama counties have stopped issuing marriage licenses to all couples in an effort to circumvent the ruling.
Albritton’s bill was passed by the state Senate on a vote of 23–3 in March. The bill mandates that “all requirements to obtain a marriage license by the State of Alabama are hereby abolished and repealed. The requirement of a ceremony of marriage to solemnize the marriage is abolished.”
Albritton characterizes his bill as forming a clear separation between church and state, and says it also protects ministers from having to perform same-sex “marriages” because they would no longer be acting as agents of the state. “It keeps elected officials from preventing or performing civil ceremonies, but also prevents ministers from performing ceremonies under the auspices of the state,” he said.
Under current Alabama law couples must obtain a marriage license, have it solemnized in a ceremony by an authorized person — a minister or a probate judge, for instance — who then signs the license before it is filed in the probate office.
Under SB 143, a new form functioning as a sort of marriage contract would be developed by the Alabama Department of Public Health, which tracks marriage statistics.
Changing traditions
Such a procedural change would turn tradition on its head and perhaps prove anticlimactic for the nearly 38,000 Alabama couples who marry each year, many of them in expensive and meticulously planned wedding ceremonies that follow multiple counseling sessions with the pastors who will perform the weddings. SB 143 also would mean that couples who are unchurched, need to be married quickly, or cannot afford a traditional wedding would no longer have access to a civil service.
Domestic violence agencies feared that funding derived from marriage license fees would be lost, but Albritton said the bill has been tweaked to funnel their funding through recording fees under the proposed new law. Other critics of SB 143 say it will result in legal complications for couples moving to or from the state or proving marital status for insurance or military benefits. Albritton acknowledges his bill does not address those issues and that they are likely to be fought out in the courts.
A mere transaction
However, for retired Baptist minister Gary Hardin, of Centre, the bill has much more serious consequences than legal battles. For couples to marry merely by signing some paperwork, he suggested, turns the commitment of marriage into a mere transaction.
“He can call it a form,” Hardin said of Albritton’s description of the proposed marriage paperwork, “but (it is) a kind of contract.” And a contract “is not communicating to couples that this is a covenant relationship. This is a horrible message to couples.
“By using the terms ‘contract’ or ‘form,’ you have reduced marriage from its high and lofty level — biblically and in the sight of God — to something that is more on the low ground,” Hardin said. “You are using terminology that devalues marriage.”
Hardin said he learned of the bill only in February after reading about it in newspapers when it was introduced by Albritton. He questioned why the bill has been flying under the radar for nearly a year, and that none of the ministers he has spoken to were consulted or made aware of it. “It gives the appearance that these folks in the Legislature don’t want their pastors to know what’s going on,” said Hardin, who has been writing legislators in opposition to the bill ever since he first heard of it.
SB 143, he said, is nothing more than an effort to appease the probate judges who want nothing to do with same-sex “marriages.”
“It’s an overreaction to gay ‘marriage,’” Hardin said. “Probate judges have been saying to the Legislature to get this monkey off their back.”
Hardin says this proposed law punishes traditional marriage as well as gay “marriage.”
“Their alternative is for a couple to draw up a contract,” Hardin said. “They leave some couples in a real bind. Most pastors are not going to marry a couple without requiring them to meet with them a number of times for some premarital sessions. There are some couples who do need the civil service and they won’t get that.”
Albritton says he is taking flak from people on both sides of the gay “marriage” debate. “I’m accused of being homophobic, of trying to be the anti-gay guy, to try to contend with the Supreme Court. What my bill does is provide a legal means under which people may get married — homosexuals, heterosexuals — it provides the methods and the means.”
However, what Albritton sees as a simple solution to a legal problem, Hardin views as an action that “sabotages what our churches are trying to teach” and tears at the very social fabric of traditional marriage.
“I am not for same-sex ‘marriage.’ I don’t think God approves of that,” Hardin said. “But the way they have overreacted, they have reduced the sanctity of marriage to a form. That’s sad.”
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