(Updated) Governor Confirms State Will Not Recognize Same-Sex Marriages
Or, Rather, KGW Notices This Fact Three Days Late
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
This is a peculiar story, because there doesn't appear to be anything majorly new in it. But at this writing, KGW has posted a breaking news blurb which says:
Gov. Ted Kulongoski has announced that the state of Oregon will not accept, or register with the state, marriage licenses issued to same-sex couples from any Oregon county.
But we've known at least since Tuesday that the State Vital Records office would not be certifying any same-sex marriage licenses it received from Multnomah County.
Further, KGW already posted an Associated Press story this morning which echoed the previous newspaper report from Tuesday and added some additional details:
The directive came as part of Hardy Myers' legal opinion issued last Friday. Much of the attention given to the attorney general's analysis was focused on whether counties could issue licenses to same-sex couples. But Gov. Ted Kulongoski also ordered all state agencies to comply with statutes that prohibit same-sex marriage based on Myers opinion, a spokesperson with the state attorney general's office said Thursday.
"The bottom line is the state is not going to accept marriage certificates from either Multnomah or Benton County when they start issuing them," said Kevin Neely of the attorney general's office. "The state will not be certifying these marriages."
So we're not quite certain just what the breaking news is all about, unless there's simply been some sort of official announcement from the Governor. Whatever is the case, for the moment we'll leave this with a quote from the ACLU of Oregon's Dave Fidanque (from the AP story today: "It's fairly obvious the state has been trying to put itself in the position that we can sue them and we plan to."
Update
The full KGW/AP report has been posted now, but it still doesn't appear to be seriously new news:
The marriage certificates recently issued to gay and lesbian couples are not being filed with other marriage licenses in Oregon's vast vital-records database, the Eugene Register-Guard and (Corvallis) Gazette-Times reported in their Friday editions.
Well, bully for them. Except that the Statesman Journal had the story on Tuesday. Where's the "breaking" in this breaking news story?
Anyway, there are some tidbits in this particular non-breaking news item worth passing along, mainly relating to Commissioner Lonnie Roberts, who praised the move:
"I alone questioned why the state's attorney general had not been consulted," Roberts said in a prepared statement. "I alone questioned that the county should wait until a constitutional review had been accomplished."
Beyond that, there's absolutely nothing new or breaking in the entire article, except the revelation that KGW doesn't read the Statesman Journal but does read the Register-Guard and Gazette-Times.
Update
For the sake of reference and citation here is the Register-Guard story, and here is the Gazette-Times story.
One interesting comparison here is that in the Register-Guard story, Fidanque is quoted as saying that if the state refuses to recognize same-sex marriages ""then it will be questioned by everyone - any time people are treated differently based on whether they're married."
But on the other hand, the Gazette-Times offers the story of one Portland woman who "got married just before her partner died of a terminal illness. When the mortuary requested a signature from the next-of-kin, the woman said that she was just married and there wasn't any trouble with her signing the papers."