Discussion: Alabama Woman Arrested For Offering To Perform Gay Marriage

I’m not a judge, but if a minister all of a sudden wants to conduct a marriage ceremony in my office, I’d tell them politely to do it somewhere else. And I’d tell them politily again. And then I’ll call security to get them the heck out of my office. I don’t want marriage ceremonies for people I don’t know in my office, and that is NOT homophobic.

15 minutes of fame…

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To quote: The probate judge’s office had stopped allowing ceremonies in the office, a move that was unrelated to a court’s recent decision to strike down the state’s ban on gay marriage, according to the county’s probate judge, Al Booth.

And I’m the King of Norway, Sweden and Germany all at the same time.

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TPM has something of a chronic headline issue, which does serve to discredit what’s usually decent reporting. It’s definitely clickbait, and I can’t blame them for trying to up the eyeball count in a commercial endeavor; but when a headline distorts or actually misleads, it just undercuts their claim to be a solid journalistic enterprise. @Josh_M, please give your folks some guidance on how to craft a catchy headline that’s worthy of TPM instead of a cheesy tabloid.

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I would pay to see Elizabeth Warren perform a bris. (Oh, and you owe me a new keyboard.)

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To be fair, the headline is lifted almost bodily from the article in the Montgomery Advertiser that is linked to:

I’m not necessarily denying the amount of sleaze in TPM headlines, but this is more a case of injudicious lazyness than malice aforethought. The significant difference though, is that the Montgomery Advertiser’s headline is factually accurate because it uses “after”. First she tried to perform a same-sex marriage and then she was arrested, The TPM headline crosses the line when it uses “for”. She wasn’t arrested for offering to perform a same-sex marriage, she was arrested for disorderly conduct.

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I think the “Moore” she was referring to was the Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and not the Probate Judge Al Booth. I might be wrong, but that’s what the names of the parties involved would seem to indicate.

And if you want to know what the happy couple said and did, that’s on the Montgomery Advertiser’s web site too.

http://bcdownload.gannett.edgesuite.net/montgomery/41698457001/201502/3092/41698457001_4043043506001_trim-39033043-BD42-4316-995F-F8F6F15FD001-vs.jpg

“The probate judge’s office had stopped allowing ceremonies in the office, a move that was unrelated to a court’s recent decision to strike down the state’s ban on gay marriage, according to the county’s probate judge, Al Booth.”

How does that even pass a laugh test?

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While I agree with everything you have said and the fact that she is absolutely in the wrong - stepping away from the fact that she wasn’t arrested for trying to perform the marriages, isn’t this called Civil Disobedience? She seems willing to go to jail.

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I guess I just gotta say, Alabama you are asshole!

Since, judging by your ridiculous number of attempts at justifying your comments, that Is was something that should have been a non-event. The non-event portion is as far as I am willing to go. What I believe the commentator was pointing out is that Chief Justice Roy Moore, Chief Justice of your Supreme Court is the person of whom they were speaking. Justice Moore was engaging in a cheap, unlawful grandstanding action that was not an attempt to set procedural rules in Alabama courts. Justice Moore issued a Supreme Court ORDER that is, by his own admission, an order of “his” Supreme Court in contempt of the Federal Court’s order. Period. And he did so without a case or controversy properly before him by the rules of civil procedure of ANYPLACE I am aware of, except, perhaps, Alabama. That would make Justice Moore’s order unlawful and should have been immediately vacated by the remaining Justices of the Supreme Court.

Furthermore, I question your or any of the rest of the commentators in support of the Probate Judge’s actions, ability to read for comprehension. If you had bothered to read the article from which this was taken, you will notice that the Probate Judge in this case instituted THIS PAST FRIDAY. BEFORE Chief Justice Moore’s unlawful order. It was CLEARLY an attempt to circumvent the order of the Federal Court invalidating Alabama’s unconstitutional gay marriage ban. It was done in retaliation for the newly ordered declaration of the Federal Court. As such, it was an unlawful contempt of court act by the Probate Judge.

Having said all that, @Josh_M, this should have never made it into TPM. It was an issue of purely local interest and not something that, at least at this point, is worthy or even concerns, the TPM audience.

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I read the article carefully. The “no marriages” policy was enacted out of fear that same sex marriage ruling would happen, and one has to buy the “public safety” argument from homophobe Roy Moore to think that was even intended benignly. So I view what she did as civil disobedience. She got exactly what she expected, isn’t complaining, and is no doubt hoping for publicity to change the no marriages policy. So? She didn’t write the headline.

But characterizations like “threw a hissy” and “acted like a ass” and “acting like a dickhead”? That’s not in the article, so I’m not sure why that has been overlaid into the discussion. And since when do we characterize people who are calling attention to ridiculous and egregious policies craven attention and publicity seekers out for a buck, with delusions of grandeur, just “activists with a chip on their shoulder”?

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You know who else was told repeatedly to leave? Gandhi.

Follow the link to the original story and read, then compare::

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Stupid bait click headline. The content of the article doesn’t match the reading. It appears as if there was disorderly conduct - once one refuses to leave a judge’s office.

I’m curious about the back-story, and whether it is accurate to say that the discontinuance of marriages under those circumstances is unrelated to gay marriages. But even if the order is related, as long as the order applies equally to ALL marriages, and has no specific mechanism that targets gay couples or their ability to marry, then even complaining about the order on that basis seems like a non-starter.

I like that you linked to the original story to give a fuller picture, but I fail to see how it contradicts the key thrust of @Sniffit’s comments. The judge stopped allowing the performance of ALL marriages in the probate office due to work-flow issues (supposedly). That seems reasonable and sane, especially if they expected a rush on marriages once gay marriage was legal. As long as this rule-change applies to all couples getting married - hetero or same-sex - then there is no discrimination going on. This is a non-issue. That some crusader decided to go all Don Quixote and tilt against windmills in this way just makes her look silly. This isn’t even civil disobedience, it’s just ass-clownery.

I agreed with you until the last sentence when did you become “the decider” of what the TPM readership may or may not be interested in? And “The Decider” of whether it’s local news, state news, regional, national or world?? Please don’t put yourself in the position of determining what news just might be of profound interest to members of the LGBT community.

Right now, as a kid from the 50’s and 60’s, I’m recalling being a kid and seeing another Alabaman elected official talk about segregation and listening to excuses as to why this that or another action by Dr King, SNCC and hundreds more were arrested for civil disobedience.
For the most part, Pyanfar’s words are correct

as are these;

Why are you making excuses for them? Pyanfar is, for the most part, very correct.

What’s wrong with the headline? The Reverend was arrested for offering to perform gay marriage. The Alabama newspaper headline reads “woman held after trying to perform same sex marriage.” Is that a lie? Either headline? Would she have been asked to leave if the couple were straight? Would she have been arrested if the couple was straight? Would the judge have asked her to leave if she had offered to wed a straight couple?

If anything, you would think the charge would be criminal tresspass as the judge made it clear her presence was not desired, but all she had to do was openly refuse his directive and its disorderly conduct. Either way, she was in the wrong.

Is this woman an ordained minister of a Christian church? If so, there’s going to be a real stink over religious liberty when it becomes known.

A person who sees a new policy that specifically came into being to inconvenience a newly empowered class of people is being characterized as a ass clown crusader? If this was the day after interracial marriage laws were struck down and this was a black pastor calling attention to the fact that, all of a sudden, the process has made it difficult for mixed race couples to get married the same way same race couples have gotten married all along, would you REALLY be calling him an assclown crusader?

One lone woman intentionally gets arrested in a historically bigoted judge’s office over a process in a historically bigoted state and SHE is suddenly the problem?

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