the marriage verifiers are coming

[calimac]

In the 17 years that B. and I have actually been married, nobody's ever asked us to prove it. We've filed joint tax returns and listed each other as familial dependents on all sorts of things, without any trouble. Until now.

B's employers have decided to crack down on the presumably epidemic problem of false dependents on health care benefits - at the same time that they're actually canceling the routine-care part of their policies, but that's another story - and we will be required to prove that we were actually born in the United States married.

This caused me to check and confirm something I'd noted but hadn't worried about the last time I re-filed my papers, which is that we didn't have a copy of our marriage certificate. The last thing I remember of the form we'd received when we applied for the license is of our witnesses (the best man and matron of honor - that was part of their job) signing it on the day and the temple secretary taking it away, promising to finish filling it out and to send it in. I just hoped she actually did.

Therefore I ventured down to the county clerk's office to see what would happen. At the end of a long corridor past a huge wall map of the county dated 1890 - which distracted me for quite a while - the office consisted of a long sheath of service windows, a waiting area with about 20 people in it when I arrived, and a dedicated self-service computer terminal at which you'd navigate through a menu tree to tell it what you wanted, and get a slip of paper with an alphanumeric customer number. These ranged all over the alphabet and were called in no discernible order, so you had to pay attention.

And it turned out to be no trouble at all. The clerk checked my ID, typed in to her terminal B's and my full names from the form I'd filled out, and produced a scanned image of the original form, which was immediately printed out onto a piece of official certificate paper pre-festooned with county seals and all. I paid for it and that was it.

What gets me is this: the image was of the original form, handwritten signatures and everything. It had been scanned into their computer system. And they printed a copy and gave it to me. Why couldn't the state of Hawaii have done this with Obama's birth certificate when he first applied for a copy three years ago?

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Hawaii could have printed out his birth certificate, and eventually did. But, by Hawaiian law, the announcement (or whatever) was sufficient under the law to prove birth and the actual certificate was personal information.

Besides, it was fun watching right wingers be humiliated. Again. And again.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The document they printed in the first place was also personal information: it could only be released to authorized persons.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

The document released was, by Hawaiian law, sufficient to prove birth, which is all that Obama needed to do.

When it became clear that the racist nutjobs were going crazy over yet another made up slur, Obama played it perfectly, letting them twist in the wind.

And when four-times bankrupt Donald Trump became the frontrunner in Republican polls, and something like three quarters of conservatives didn't believe that Obama was born in the US, he delivered the coup de grace.

And while the Republicans were trying to back down from the shame of being completely and 100% wrong yet again, Obama nailed bin Laden.

I don't always agree with Obama's politics, but you have to admire his style.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

A document on official paper (as Obama's 2008 document was) stating that B. and I were married would have been sufficient to prove that we were married. But what I got was not such a statement, but a scan of the original certificate. Also on official paper. That's what I would have expected an official document to be.

What I don't understand is why Hawaiian law prohibited this, and all the waffling, inconsistent, and nonsensical explanations offered to address that question. "In order to bamboozle idiots who doubt the original statement, and show them up for fools three years later when we actually do release the original document" would be a delightful answer, no more nonsensical than others.

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

My understanding was that Hawaiian law precludes releasing any copy of the "long form" birth certificate without special dispensation from the person named on the certificate and and exception made by the head of the department.
For privacy reasons.

So it would have been illegal to do what you suggested.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But my question is, why? I had to prove that I was one of the persons named on the marriage certificate to get that, but I got it: a scan of the original certificate. I didn't get a form saying it was on file, which is what Obama got in 2008; I didn't need any special dispensation beyond proving my identity; I just got it. Why should Hawaiian law be so bizarrely coy about providing copies of original certificates to the people named on them?

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

There are many laws in many venues regarding which asking "Why?" is futile. It's just the way it is.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There is no such thing as a law without a reason. That reason may be trivial, outmoded, irrelevant, venial, or undiscoverable, but there always is one.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I didn't say there is no reason; I said that asking for it is futile.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Evidently asking around here is.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

You said, "It's just the way it is." This implies not that the reason is undiscoverable, but that there is no other reason, and since "It's just the way it is" is not a reason = there is no reason.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

OK, if you say so.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't say so. You say so. I say not so.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

It's probably because the birth certificate is a key document in establishing identity. The state has a compelling interest in controlling its records about its citizens. Individual citizens occasionally need to prove who they are, but they can do that with a lesser copy of their birth record that cannot be confused with the original. This is basic operational security and it's no surprise that the state have had this down for a long time.

The whole birther affair only proved that there was no legitimate reason for anyone to see Obama's original birth certificate. The state was entirely right in telling the birthers to go away.

Marriage certificates are vital records but not at the same level as birth certificates. It is understandable that the rules are more lax. In some states, if you pretend to be married for long enough, you are married legally. It generally doesn't work that way with citizenship.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That actually has some content as an explanation, so thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not sure if it holds up. Some states still have common-law marriage (fewer than used to), but California is not one, and the state of being married is of equal concern to certain outside parties as the state of being natively born, as is witnessed by the reason I needed to get a copy in the first place.

If a jurisdiction issues scanned replica marriage certificates but, like Hawaii, does not normally issue scanned replica birth certificates, that would be consistent with your idea. But if they don't have that combination, it wouldn't hold up. On a quick look I can't find anything online definitively saying one way or the other. FWIW, I have a copy of my own original birth certificate, but that's from yet another jurisdiction and a long time ago.

The birthers are irrelevant to my question. They got nothing out of the state of Hawaii and deserved nothing. Both Hawaii and California have laws limiting the issuance of such documents to persons with a tangible interest; I had to show my ID to get a copy of my own marriage certificate. It was not the birthers, but Obama himself, who applied for a copy of his birth certificate in 2008, and what he got is what Hawaii normally sends, not the certificate but a new document saying they have the record. Obama then released it of his own free will.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've gone back to the clerk's office and determined that they have and give scans of birth and death certificates as well.

The way I determined this was: I didn't mention in the post that there are self-service terminals at the office. You can look up anything that you have all the vital info (full name, date) for, and view the scan, but you can't print it out. You can order copies, presumably if you're eligible to get them, but I didn't do that from there because I'd already filled out the paper form and signed up for a window appointment before I discovered this.

Anyway, when I went back, I looked up my brothers, who were born in this county, and my brother who died in this county, as I knew all the vital info, and there were scans of the original certificates, negatives for the older stuff.

So the security distinction between marriage and birth certificates doesn't hold in this jurisdiction, at least.