Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Totally different cases.
Nope. State law vs state law. Your peripheral ideas about it are irrelevant.
Huh? It's federal law:
US Constitution wrote:
Article IV, Section 1:
Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.
The question is why this should apply for a marriage license, but not a concealed carry permit? The argument is the same in both cases. The more restrictive state says that they should not have to honor the status granted in another state if the recipient would not qualify for said status in their state. And that's not without precedent. If you get a drivers license in one state, they'll let you use it to drive in another, but once you become a resident, you must qualify for the license in the state you are now living in. You can't just continue driving on the out of state license.
The same precedent applies to contracts and legal agreements as well. Ever read the small print on legal contracts, contests, or offers, where they say something like "except where prohibited by state law" or "not in <list of states>". That's because the laws for whatever the agreement is talking about are different in those states.
The GM argument is that despite this being allowed in a boatload of other things, that marriage should not be one of them. That somehow, marriage is special, and a marriage granted in one state, no matter how much it violates the law in another must not only be recognized in that other state, but that said state must grant that marriage whatever benefits and advantages the marriage laws grant, even if they were expressly written to prohibit their application to the couple in question. The point of the CC argument is to ask they question "why this, but not that". Maybe open up a few eyes.
Oh. And my point was that if we're going to try to create any sort of consistent methodology to answer the question "why this, but not that", it should be based on the whole positive versus negative thing. States should logically be least bound to honor agreements that obligate them to do something on behalf or the agreement holder, and most bound to honor agreements that merely require that they *not* prevent an otherwise free action on the part of said agreement holder. It costs the state nothing to not take an action against me. It costs the state something if required to take an action for me. IMO, that's at least part of the criteria we should be looking at when making this determination.