Does A Louisiana Justice of the Peace Have to Do Interracial Marriages? (More Great PR For Louisiana)

Ugh as soon as I saw this today I knew this would be going national. I see Vox Nova has picked up on it at La. interracial couple denied marriage license by justice of the peace

First a little pet peeve of mine in the reporting of this all over the place . Justices of the Peace do not issue marriage licenses. That is the Parish Clerk of Court who does that.

Now a JOP, a minister, or a Judge has to sign it but they are not issuing the license (the Judge can issue one if it is the Parish Clerk getting married) . I don't know why these newspapers are getting the terms so wrong on this. All this is sort of contributing to the confusion of the legal issues involved.

I would recommend this Hammond Newspaper article on this that fleshes out some additional details.

The Justice of the Peace is sort of the low man on the elected and legal totem pole in Louisiana. In fact I suspect most rural people don't know who their JOP is. A typical Parish has several if not more JOPs. They are usually done by the Parish political subdivision of wards.

The Justice of the Peace I do not believe receives an official salary. They make money off their "fees" Some JOP's hardly do anything. But many in JOPs and especially in South Louisiana seem to make a major SUBSTANTIAL income off their fees. So if you promote yourself to the folks as an alternative venue for many kinds of cases you can make some money.

There is a I guess an interesting legal question here. Does this JOP have the right to refuse to do interracial weddings. Well the JOP is sort of what you make it. You can either just be an almost unnoticeable bump on a log or you can be quite active. This JOP is correct that he if he chooses he can do no weddings period!!!

I don't think District Judges (the main elected Judge or Judges for the Parish) are normally obligated to perform weddings. There seems to be a lot of "mays" in this law. Though I never heard any refuse to do them .

It would seem that a District Judge would be obligated to perform a wedding if the people involved filed something stating a objection to the religious nature of a ministers. That is because a Marriage to be valid must have a "ceremony" and someone has to do it.

Anyway in the real world and indeed in this Parish where this incident is taking place there is no shortage of Judges and JOP's and such that could marry them (perform the ceremony and sign the certificate).

So there is no real practical burden . Also as as the JOP points out they cannot get a required Fee for performing marriages.

So for all these reasons this case presents some legal issues that that can not just be dismissed with a waive of the hand by the local NAACP and ACLU that is cited in the article.

But the fact he performs some weddings and is a State Actor would seem to be enough to me to trigger all those equal Protection problems and thus makes it very likely that this conduct is illegal. Needless to say the famous Loving case is involved . Further the interesting case dealing with placement of children with the parent of the most similar race Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429 (1984) is in the background.

He is not in the same situation of lets say a notary that can decide to notarize or not notarize a document. We don't elect Notaries. But the situation here I admit is one of those borderline areas that gets kind of gray.

However I think a Court would find that because his power to do marriages is granted by the State via election he cannot pick and choose who he performs on the basis of race of the parties. He can go for instance " hey if you vote for me don't expect to be do any weddings because that would mean I would have to do that for interracial folks too./. That would be legal. But once he starts doing weddings he opens a can of worms for himself.



I actually wonder if the main avenue to address this concern is the Supreme Court. They have jurisdiction over JOP courts of course. Would a Disciplinary action by the Court be used here?

Let me add I totally disagree with what this JOP did on moral, religious and ethical grounds. Still is there not an interesting side story here? Is not his attitude about children similar to many social workers(even liberals ones) that will not place lets say black kids with white families and vice versa?

Update-Needless to say from what I can observe the typical Louisiana resident reaction to this story has been disbelief.