General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The NVC rejected my marriage certification. My wife's Green Card is dead [View all]Ms. Toad
(34,059 posts)To be married you have to be single at the time. So if you have ever been married, to anyone, you have to provide certified copies (at a minimum) of the court termination of the prior marriage as part of the licensing process.
Civil unions are not marriages.
Your friends' legal marriage is in California, as of Obergefell (which said denial of such marriages was unconstitutional and always had been, so pre-existing marriages which were legal at their inception were recognized as of the date of inception). If your friends answered the question as to marital status accurately (under the law at the time) Illinois should not have permitted them to marry since they were already married. My guess is that they inaccurately stated that they were not married to each other. (Not suggesting anything nefarious on their part - merely that they did not understand the law when they answered teh question.)
From the Cook County, Illinois website:
Under Illinois law, only eligible persons can marry. Both partners must:
be 18 years of age or older
not be blood relatives
not already be legally married to someone else or each other
In our case - at the time we were married in Canada, our marriage was not legally recognized in Ohio - since it was before Obergefell. At the time we were married in Canada, the legal answer to the question was that we were single, since we did not satisfy the 4th element for a common law marriage. Obergefell retroactively changed the answer to the 4th element and created a common law marriage that predated the Canadian marriage. Nothing we could have done to avoid the trap (other than hope that someday there would be an Obergefell).
I know your friends are not alone. I am an attorney, and this is an area of law where I have some expertise. I counseled quite a few friends contemplating such a path against attempting to create more than one marriage. It will be a nightmare for courts to sort out - especially when folks like your friends who were legally married in CA (or other early marriage states) split without formally divorcing, then married someone else elsewhere. I won't be teaching family law at the time these cases eventually make their way through the courts, but I expect to see a family law bar exam question along the lines of your friends (and I will be preparing folks to take the bar exam until I retire).