From the Editor

Getting Married Without a Marriage License in Maine

By:  David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal, January 9, 2013

Most people in Maine suffer the delusion that it is absolutely mandatory to have a marriage license in order to be married. However, that is not entirely true.

Without going into the history of marriage licenses in Maine, since that has been dealt with in past writings here in FFJ, I want to remind you all what the legal definition of a “license” is:

license: a revocable permission to commit some act that would otherwise be unlawful (see Black’s Law, 7th ed)

By declaring marriage to be unlawful, the State of Maine has positioned itself to be a surrogate ‘god’ over those of all religious faiths who wish to be married. That is, they must come to the god of the State of Maine, bow and submit and ask for its permission to be married.

Many a Christian who loves the Lord has been duped into this form of marriage under a false god. But the State left a few loopholes so it could have plausible deniability. That is, it could tell the Lord God that if offered people an out, that they had another way to be married if they so chose.

One of those loopholes is found in the Maine Revised Statutes (MRS) at Title 19-A, section 658. That section authorizes members of the Quaker faith and Bahá’i faith to be married according to their own criteria, exempting them from the marriage license requirements, as long as the person who solemnized the marriage files the information with their local town clerk.

The Quakers are a group of Christians formed in mid-17th century England. Being derived from Protestant groups, they attempted to convert others to their understanding of Christianity, travelling both around Britain and overseas, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. They stress the importance of a direct relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and a direct religious belief in the universal priesthood of all believers. They emphasize a personal and direct religious experience of Christ, acquired through both direct spiritual experience and the reading and studying of the Bible.

The Bahá'i faith is the newest in the scheme of religious history and one of the largest in the world, after Christianity. It is not based upon Christianity, but on the understanding that there is one God who is the ruler of the universe. According to www.bahai.org, “The Faith’s Founder was Bahá’u’lláh, a Persian nobleman from Tehran who, in the mid-nineteenth century, left a life of princely comfort and security and, in the face of intense persecution and deprivation, brought to humanity a stirring new message of peace and unity. Bahá’u’lláh claimed to be nothing less than a new and independent Messenger from God. His life, work, and influence parallel that of Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad. Bahá’ís view Bahá’u’lláh as the most recent in this succession of divine Messengers. The essential message of Bahá’u’lláh is that of unity. He taught that there is only one God, that there is only one human race, and that all the world’s religions represent stages in the revelation of God’s will and purpose for humanity.”

Of those two religious faiths, MRS 19-A Sec. 658 says,

“A marriage solemnized among Quakers or Friends, in the form practiced in their meeting, or solemnized among members of the Baha'i faith according to the rules and principles of the Baha'i faith, is valid and not affected by this subchapter. The clerk or the keeper of the records of the meeting or ceremony in which a marriage is solemnized shall return evidence of the solemnization of the marriage as provided in section 654...”

In addition to being of the Quaker or Bahá’i faith, there appears to be another way to be married without the license for those who do not choose to bow and submit to the false god of the State. It can be found buried in a mountain of legalese in MRS 19-A, Sec. 657 which says,

“A marriage, solemnized before any known inhabitant of the State professing to be a justice, judge, notary public or an ordained or licensed minister of the gospel, is not void, nor is its validity affected by any want of jurisdiction or authority in the justice, judge, notary or minister or by any omission or informality in entering the intention of marriage, if the marriage is in other respects lawful and consummated with a full belief, on the part of either of the persons married, that they are lawfully married.”

What that essentially says is that if someone presents themselves as one who is authorized to solemnize a marriage, but isn’t really authorized, the marriage is still valid as long as the two who are married believe they are married and the marriage is otherwise lawful. The statutes then define unlawful marriages as ones where the couple are using marriage to evade the state, are engaging in incestuous relationships or are mentally incapacitated (see 19-A. Sec. 701).

Now, an authorized person can be either a judge, justice of the peace, member of the Maine Bar—all State-created offices—or an ordained minister of a religion (the state does not define “ordained” or what religions are allowable, it leaves that open); or a cleric within that religious body of believers. Again, the state can’t say what religion is “authorized” or not, or what constitutes an ordained minister or cleric within any particular religious group.

The statutes do provide for a $100 fine for someone not authorized to solemnize marriages but does so anyway, or who is authorized but does not fill out the necessary licensing forms.

This brings us to the second part of that above cite of section 657. It describes a marriage’s validity not being affected even in the event of an “omission or informality in entering the intention of marriage...”. Which can be read as a failure to fill out and file a marriage license.

Now, the false god of the State is going to kick and scream and use its priests in black robes that it calls “judges” to demand submission to its marriage covenant under penalty of fine or fee. But, those who choose to be married under the Lord God can do so and still file that information with their town clerk, as the law allows, and as we originally did in the early days of Maine’s history, without a license issued by their town clerk. However, most town clerks are so ignorant of the law and our history, they won’t know how to deal with people who choose not to have the State of Maine as their god but instead choose the God of the universe.

More Editorials by David Deschesne