to cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples or show cause before this court.

I would have expected them to ask the city to cease the activity AND show cause, which is what I suspect they meant by the semicolon.

This looks like a lame stall tactic to me…

Uncle: whether the ends can justify the means depends, at least in part, on what you think those ends will be. Do you see this flurry of fake marriages helping the gay marriage cause in the long term? If so, how?

No, not really. As you point out, the two sentances mean different things. With the semi-colon, it means X AND Y. With the or it means X OR Y. they are two different things, especially in a legal sense. One gets action, one doesn’t. Judges shouldn’t tell lawyers what the lawyers meant to say – thats the lawyers job.

Uncle: interesting idea, but it will never work. Sooner or later, this matter will end up before an appellate court, and these bogus “marriages” will be declared null and void. Once that happens, there will be no full faith and credit argument to advance in foreign (out of state) courts. I suppose a rogue foreign court might pounce on the issue before the California courts have fully litigated the matter, but even if they do, all that’s going to accomplish is to create a little more short-term chaos. It won’t persuade a single member of the public to support gay marriage in principle, and it might well provoke Congress to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban gay marriage (and arguably civil unions, as well) from coast to coast.

Actually, NPR had two legal experts on today (one from Harvard Law School, one from the University of Nebraska) discussing the implications of gay marriage. One common theme was that the case law is very clear: the full faith and credit clause of the constitution does NOT require states to recognize marriages that would not have been legal in that state. Most of the case law comes from cases dealing interracial marriages, but other cases involved teenage marriage, first-cousin marriage, etc. So even now, the precedent is that the full faith and credit clause doesn’t apply here.

The other common theme was the impact of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which would pretty much nullify gay marriages in any state that didn’t recognize them.

The most interesting question came from a caller who’s stationed in the Navy in Florida. If a sailor (or member of another military branch) got a legally-sanctioned gay marriage, and they then listed their same-sex spouse as next of kin (spouses generally get that designation), would this violate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and result in discharge and loss of benefits? I didn’t get to hear the answer, but it’s an interesting question, and one I hadn’t thought of. (And it points out the ridiculousness of “don’t ask, don’t tell…”)