More than a hundred people in a homosexual relationship have received marriage licenses from Hamilton County clerk Bill Knowles.
The licenses were issued from June 26 through Feb. 3, according to a county spreadsheet.
The rush to homosexual nuptials was the U.S. supreme court’s publication of the Obergefell v. Hodges opinion, which is generally said to have overturned marriage in all 50 states.
The 101 gay unions are nearly 7 percent of marriages licensed by Tennessee state government in Hamilton County.
Altogether Mr. Knowles licensed 1,469 marriages in that period. The balance of 93 percent are contracted between one man and one woman.
July 2 was the busiest day for homosexual unions in the county. Six couples obtained state permission and a license for their same-sex relations, all of which are recorded by Mr. Knowles as lawful and legal, no different than the licenses issued that day to man-woman couples.
Rural Reluctance
The number of gays in Hamilton County tally at least three times as large as the 1.7 percent of the American population said to be homosexual. Gallup says 3.8 percent of the adult population “identify themselves” as “lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.”
The rate may be disproportionately in favor of same-sex couples because Hamilton County’s being the seat of a city. Homosexuality is less common in rural America, where marriage is part of traditional and conservative culture.
In rural counties near Chattanooga 2.28 percent of licenses have been to gays.
- Sequatchie County licensed 67 marriages, none to gays, clerk Charlotte Cagle says.
- Rhea County issued 116 licenses from June 1 through Feb. 8, with three being same-sex, according to clerk Linda Shaver.
- Bradley County clerk Donna Simpson says 560 marriages of all kind were licensed, of which 14 were between people of the same sex. The period in question is from June 26 through Feb. 8.
Obergefell is an attempt by the court majority to reconstruct the mores and perspective of a people who at their nation’s founding were largely Christian. The project is egalitarian in theory and relies on state power for its accomplishment.
What the State Creates, It Controls
Homosexuals cannot marry at common law, which is essentially biblical in its holdings about the human race. They marry as a matter of state grant, privilege and permission, accomplishing effectively a right an act and relationship that was a capital offense in the original 13 American colonies.
For that is the definition of license. A license is “a permission, usu. revocable, to commit some act that would otherwise be unlawful,” says Black’s Law Dictionary, 8th edition. A license is permission to do an act unlawful, illegal or otherwise forbidden.
Couples who marry under the state’s authority do two important things against self-interest. They create a marriage bond with three partners, the state being the primary and enabling partner, and thus able to claim important authority over the fruit of that union, namely the children.
Secondarily, when a man and woman marry under state license, they forsake the exercise of a right to marry entirely on their own. In asking the state for a permission to wed, they pretend they lack capacity to unite in wedlock until death.
Marriage is a common law right because it comes from the creation of mankind. Every man has a right from God to marry the woman of his choosing, and she has every right to accept a man of her choosing. This right exists in every human being, regardless of whether he or she believes in a creator God. Constitutions refer to such rights as unalienable because they are God-given.
Homosexuals have no choice in the marriage question except through favor from the state. Gays need permission to do what is unlawful and otherwise a crime. Republicans and Democrats in Nashville have used Obergefell to impose homosexual unions on all.
Unlike gays, people in traditional culture or in Christianity have an absolute right to marry apart from any court opinion or any state law.
Tennessee law pretends to have deleted the right to marry and having replaced it with marriage through agency of the state. As David Fowler points out in his Feb. 4 Bradley County lawsuit over Tennessee’s marriage law, the state has made marriage a subject of regulation since 1778.
In Title 36 the sovereign declares void any marriage contracted within the state but outside its authority. In other words, state government rejects marriage as an exercise of common law right and views any common law marriage contracted within the state as a nullity. A couple who enters marriage at common law in Tennessee cannot resort to its courts in a divorce. The state in its high-handedness imposes bastardy on children born outside of statutory wedlock.
Obergefell aside, marriage law is directory in Tennessee at best, a legal fiction that cannot stand a true assertion of a constitutional rights properly claiming a free course of innocent liberty. Marriage law cannot extinguish unalienable rights to marriage. The state is mere pretense as against any man’s natural right before God to marry the woman of his choosing.
The state’s claim to exclusive jurisdiction over marriage in the name of public morals and the good order of society is full of pride. It haughtily denigrates ancient rights that precede state and church.
So what is common law marriage? What is its form? Marriage under the constitution is established five ways: Capacity, consent, consummation (sexual intercourse), cohabitation and holding-forth. A state license is a document asserting these conditions are met without anyone having to take the trouble to prove them.
State law operates on the premise of power over the citizen. Obergefell and the state’s capitulation to its revolutionary claims are merely a furthering of that theory of power.
Only now state law has been decimated by the federal judiciary’s implied “preemption by ‘judicial fiat,’” as Jeff Atherton, Hamilton County chancery court judge, puts it.
Acting in line with Judge Atherton’s eyebrow-raising opinion in August, Mr. Fowler is suing on behalf of minister Guinn E. Green and Bradley Commissioner Howard Thompson, whose arguments suggest a bright ray of light for defenders of marriage.
Namely, the return of common law marriage in which lifelong sexual unions between man and woman — and these alone — are the basis of human society and civilization.
Common law marriage is really a form of local economy marriage. It says we can do it here, by ourselves, without outside help, outside regulation and supervision. We don’t need Nashville’s laws, TCA codebooks and state approval and consent to appreciate marriage and live it out in practice.
We can handle marriage here in Chattanooga quite well enough, thank you.
The more power to us.
— David Tulis hosts a show 9 to 11 a.m. weekdays at
AM 1240 Hot News Talk Radio, covering local economy and free markets in Chattanooga and beyond.
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Why did I not need to see who wrote the article "Gays Get 7 Percent Marriage Licenses In Hamilton County, 2 Percent Elsewhere?"
I recognized the baleful moan of another religious reactionary crying in the outhouse of his own sanctimonious making. Not content to live alone in his hate-filled hell of tormented orthodoxy, he constantly blusters to turn back the clock to the dark ages of persecution for being different than him.
His brand of religious freedom requires that his is the only religious freedom accepted; that his madness be imposed as the Divine Will for he is the mouthpiece of his Divine Tyrant and a willing executioner in that inquisition.
The writer and other thumping busybodies, who continually push to stop anyone who seeks peace and tranquility outside the narrow-minded and soul-crushing fanaticism of religious extremism, were perfectly described by a sage of the 20th century.
"Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." - H. L. Mencken
So along with Mencken and others, I choose to laugh while they froth and the spittle flies.
Stephen Greenfield
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I see no relevance in what Mr. Tulis always rants about. He continually tries to impose his religious beliefs on others, which his theology is totally fine for him and is a fundamental right that he possesses, is what I have issue with. His rights I have no problem with. It's his opinion that his thinking is the only correct way and everyone else is wrong.
I do appreciate the statistical data, but again: why is it relevant? If marriage between man and woman is a biblical right, when church and state are still supposed to be separate, and so sacred and sanctified, then why is it that at least 50 percent of marriages between a man and a woman end in divorce? Shall they be stoned like the Bible says? Stoning is as ridiculous of an idea now as someone's defiance of laws and the highest court we have in our system regarding human rights to marry whoever they love based upon their personal religious ideals.
Bottom line: if you are truly that upset about and vehemently against gay marriage, then don't get married to someone of the same sex as you. Plain and simple. The only reason gay marriage could effect a heterosexual marriage is if one of the two is gay and hiding or suppressing it. It still has no bearing on anyone else's marriage. Your marriage will not crumble if someone else's fails,
Richard Hendricks-Smith
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Mr. Tullis' letter indicates that he refuses to acknowledge the difference between the secular and the sacred--largely because he does not seem to distinguish between the two.
By failing to do so, he also refuses to acknowledge that the Supreme Court ruling invalidates the manner in which the "state controls." His take on this issue unsurprisingly straddles a divide between touting state power and flaunting it in favor of the construct he calls the "Local Economy" depending on which entity supports his position.
Finally, Mr. Tullis didn't pause during his composition to consider one key point about the statistic he places in bold type. The "Rural Reluctance" he imagines could have many causes. Perhaps, same-sex couples living in those rural counties might feel more comfortable traveling to Hamilton County for a marriage license? My marriage isn't threatened by this statistic---and neither is his. I'm rather surprised someone took the time to obtain such "data" from the county clerk's office.
Will Taylor