Louisiana's birth certificate requirement for marriage challenged in court

[brooklynite]

Source: Times-Picayune

Viet Anh Vo is a U.S. citizen who has lived in Louisiana since he was an infant, but he says in court papers he's unable to get a marriage license under a 2015 state law that, he argues, discriminates against the foreign-born.

A federal judge in New Orleans was set to hear the case Wednesday (March 22).

At issue is a requirement that marriage license applicants present a certified copy of their birth certificates. The 31-year-old Vo was born in an Indonesian refugee camp after his parents fled Vietnam. Vietnamese and Indonesian authorities did not recognize his birth or issue a birth certificate, his lawsuit says.

Defendants in his suit are state officials and court clerks in three parishes where he was denied a license. It's unclear when the judge will rule.

Read more: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2017/03/louisianas_birth_certificate_r.html

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BREAKING: Court issues Preliminary Injunction:

Link to tweet

[unblock]

1. that one seems blatant. how is anyone in that situation supposed to rectify it?

[gopiscrap]

2. yup pure racism

[azureblue]

3. not so nefarious

The law is there to be certain the person who is applying for the marriage license is who they say they are. It is easy to get fake SS card and driver's licenses, so, if a person uses these to apply for a ML, then a new ID is established under a fake name. The problem is the law wasn't written to allow exceptions like this one.

[geek tragedy]

4. Those exceptions were intentionally omitted. The point of this law is not to prevent ID fraud

it's to persecute those who are not native-born.

This is the state where a majority of white people wanted David Duke as their governor. Given the exodus of black folks from there ex post Katrina, it's essentially a white supremacist state.

[displacedtexan]

5. Exactly. Back in the day, when Texas was a blue state...

...there were many people who were either born in slavery or born the children of slaves. All it took was a witness or a sworn statement for them to be issued state ID cards. I can't imagine how they would be treated today.

[IronLionZion]

6. To fight the war against fake marriages?

Is marriage fraud a problem?

There are many other documents that provide better proof of identity. Birth certificate is not the best id as we saw with Obama's birther problem.

Birth certificates are white privilege as many poor minorities were often born at home or in overcrowded lower cost clinics that are not the best at record keeping. A lot of whites don't know this is a problem and don't think about it. The wrong types of people in power know exactly what they are doing and it is deliberately nefarious to non-whites.

If it's so easy to get a fake SS card and driver's license, then why not a fake birth certificate?

[okwmember]

7. As a person who issues Driver Licenses that isn't the case with Real ID anymore.

If you have a real id DL then you have already presented your docs to government showing your legal status (citizen or otherwise). Also if he's naturalized why isn't his Certificate of Naturalization enough?