Los Angeles man sues for right to take wife’s last name
January 12, 2007 Musings No CommentsThat’s right! The ACLU is now supporting a man in his struggle to take the last name of the woman he intends to marry without undergoing the traditional name change procedure for anyone wishing to rename themselves. The plaintiff, Michael Buday, is alleging that the $320 fee he must pay, as well as the advertisements he must take out in newspapers to announce the official name change, constitute discrimination, since his wife could change her last name for a mere $50 as part of the process of formalizing the marriage. The full story is available here.
I appreciate this man’s efforts to put back in the past another rediculously outdated notion, that of a woman becoming the property of her husband upon marrying him. Also, it should shed some light once again on the difference between the state’s civil definition of marriage and various Christian organizations’ religious views on the institution which unfortunately shares the common name of ‘marriage.’ What may seem at first silly is in fact a serious point of contention in this country right now, especially in light of the struggle of gay rights groups to achieve the same legal and civil protections which secular marriage laws now afford only to heterosexual couples. We must, as a nation, come to understand that the reasons for two people to come together and share their lives with one another are often unrelated to any Christian or other religious values, and that offering secular advantages for adherents to certain religious viewpoints violates the separation of church and state that we supposedly hold so dear to our very basic notion of liberty.