Amendment tests loom

Legal questions are starting to emerge — along with serious uncertainties about personal relationships — now that voters have supported amending the Utah Constitution to say that marriage exists only between a man and a woman.

Newly passed Amendment 3 takes effect Jan. 1, but already Utah lawyers are exploring ways to employ this legal standard — based on its second sentence, which prevents the legal recognition of any domestic union that is the same, or substantially equivalent, to a marriage.

Salt Lake attorney Mary Corporon recently filed a motion for a male client who contends that Amendment 3 makes it unconstitutional to enforce a court protective order that his former live-in girlfriend got from a judge.

Corporon's client was charged with violating the order that was to keep him away from the girlfriend and the apartment they formerly shared. Violating a protective order is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

"If you have two people who occupy the same space together, a man and a woman in a romantic relationship, and the court steps in and says, 'One of you gets to occupy the space you have and the other doesn't,' that begins to look like a marriage breaking up and the temporary protective orders issued in divorces," Corporon said.

While Corporon's motion has yet to be ruled on, it is reminiscent of arguments made by amendment opponents who warned of unintended consequences from Amendment 3.

Attorney Monte Stewart, co-chairman of Utahns for a Better Tomorrow, which supported the amendment, said arguments such as Corporon's are bad ones that will ultimately fail.

"Lawyers representing clients, especially in criminal cases, are obligated to throw up just about everything and anything they can think of," Stewart said. "That's just the nature of the system. As they throw these arguments up, one by one, they will be rejected."

Amendment 3, he said, simply "preserves Utah's long-standing marriage policy — the state will give legal sanction, that is approval, to one and only one sexually based relationship — that is the legal union of a man and a woman."

Former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael Zimmerman, however, said it's no surprise that Amendment 3 would be invoked in cases having nothing to do with same-sex marriage, and he expects more lawyers will test such theories.

"Wholly apart from the civil rights issue, the troubling part is that second section," said Zimmerman, who opposed the amendment. "Never underestimate the creativity of lawyers as they look for ways to use it in situations where it wasn't anticipated. . . . Who knows the number of ways it could crop up?"

Recent comments