ONTARIO, Canada – A news report from Canada has stated that a lawyer in the current government has taken a position in a trial-level divorce proceeding that a same-sex couple’s marriage is not valid because the couple were not Canada residents at the time that they married, and the law of their home jurisdiction did not permit them to marry at the time. This has raised fears that thousands of same-sex marriages between foreign gay couples performed in Canada may not be valid.
The test case has been brought by one American and one English woman, who married in Canada in 2005, and now want to divorce. Gay rights groups have issued a joint statement saying, “No one’s marriage has been invalidated or is likely to be invalidated. The position taken by one government lawyer in a divorce is not itself precedential. No court has accepted this view and there is no reason to believe that either Canada’s courts or its Parliament would agree with this position, which no one has asserted before during the eight years that same-sex couples have had the freedom to marry in Canada.”
Founder and executive director of Freedom to Marry, Evan Wolfson, stated the government’s position would have an effect throughout the country and the world, “One of the benefits that marriage gives to families is security and clarity. They don’t have to deal with a tangle of uncertainty. If the Canadian government is serious about trying to cast doubt on people’s marriages, it not only insults their dignity and hurts them personally, but it raises all sorts of complex legal and economic questions for everyone who deals with them – employers, businesses, banks, and on and on.”
