Saturday, December 27, 1997
Married couples may not be married after all
By ELLEN PERLMAN / Governing Magazine
Always wanted the cachet of having "The Reverend"
in front of your name? Just mail an application in to the Universal
Life Church, and go shopping for a clerical collar.
To the attorney general's office in Tennessee, that seemed
too easy. A little investigating turned up a dog, a dead person
and convicted murderers on death row who had been ordained by
the mail-order church with no background checks, much less a stretch
in divinity school.
So what's the harm? Well, Tennesseans who were married by Universal
Life ministers may not be married at all. Tennessee is one of
several states whose attorneys general have questioned the validity
of mail-orderminister marriages.
And there have been plenty of them. It turns out that Gatlinburg,
Tenn., at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains, has become something
of a Las Vegas East. There are more than two dozen little wedding
chapels in the area; although Sevier County has just 60,000 people,
17,000 marriage licenses were issued last year. And some of the
ministers doing the marrying were ordained by the Universal Life
Church.
When couples learned their marital status might be questionable,
they began flooding the attorney general's office with inquiries.
"We were bombarded with a lot of calls," says spokeswoman
Sharon Curtis-Flair.
That's when Curtis-Flair changed her voice mail message, telling
people to call the chapel where they were married for information.
She also offered to send them a copy of the attorney general's
marriage opinion so they could decide for themselves whether their
marriage was valid.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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Copyright ©1997,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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