Well after all, we can't have MA becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage ~ Mitt
Viva Las Vegas, with Mitt in a white Elvis jumpsuit..
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | March 31, 2006
"The state's highest court ruled yesterday that Governor Mitt Romney and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly had the authority to use a 1913 state law to block out-of-state gay couples from marrying here after same-sex marriage became legal in 2004.
The Supreme Judicial Court said the obscure law, which prohibits Massachusetts from marrying an out-of-state couple if the marriage would not be legal in their home state, passed constitutional muster and could be applied to five same-sex couples from Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, because gay marriage is expressly prohibited in those states.
The court, however, said state officials had applied the law too broadly when they refused to allow the marriage of three couples from New York and Rhode Island, because same-sex marriage is not explicitly prohibited in those states. The high court sent the case of those three couples back to Superior Court Judge Carol Ball, who upheld the 1913 law last year, to quickly determine whether same-sex marriage is prohibited in those states. No time frame was set.
''The laws of this Commonwealth have not endowed nonresidents with an unfettered right to marry," Justice Francis X. Spina wrote in his opinion. ''Only nonresident couples who come to Massachusetts to marry and intend to reside in this Commonwealth thereafter can be issued a marriage license without consideration of any impediments to marriage that existed in their former home states."