With limited days and a loaded agenda, the Alabama Legislature is challenged each year to complete its business without the governor having to call a special session.
Priority issues including education funding, lottery legislation, capital offense legislation concerns and health care reform are among those that saw bills pre-filed before the start of this month's session.
With real issues to be debated and decided, it's unfortunate to see political pandering and grandstanding eat up valuable time on the House and Senate floor with needless legislation. And the clearest example may come from Sen. Greg Albritton (R-Bay Minette), who pre-filed legislation to take away the requirement of marriage licenses in Alabama in favor of 'marriage contracts' that would be filed in probate judge's offices.
Albritton has said the inspiration for his bill was Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, whose 15 minutes of fame last year came when she was jailed for refusing to issue same sex marriage licenses.
“Kentucky is a precursor to where we are headed,” Albritton recently told the New York Times.
Several probate judges in Alabama simply stopped issuing marriage licenses last year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that upheld same sex marriages. Some of those judges publicly stated they would outright refuse to issue the licenses, in spite of directives from a federal court judge to do so.
So in comes Albritton on his white horse, with the self-described purpose of his Senate Bill 377 to “bring order out of chaos,” as he stated it.
“The sanctity of marriage can not be sanctified by government of men. That is where we have gotten ourselves in trouble.”
And the sanctimony of grandstanding politicians can not triumph over a federal court order and constitutional protections. But such an adage doesn't earn a pandering elected official as many votes.
Albritton's proposed legislation would no longer require marriage licenses in Alabama. Instead, a probate office would simply record a “marriage contract” witnessed by two adults at a fee of $35. If Albritton wants to get the state out of the marriage license business, it would seem the the state would keep its hands out of the wallets or purses of Alabama residents. So Sen. Albritton hopes to move Alabama out of the marriage license business, but in typical political fashion, let's keep that fee around to fill the cash troughs in Montgomery.
Whether you agree or disagree with same sex marriage, that's a constitutional argument for another time and place. Albritton's bill proposes to fix something that's not broken. It's another example of wasting Alabama resources to fight a losing battle in an attempt to garner some publicity and political mileage. Just ask the Alabama Attorney General's office about that. Attorney General Luther Strange's office could be on the hook for more than $200,000 of attorney's fees incurred in its losing legal battle to uphold Alabama's same sex marriage ban.
If the State of Alabama has an extra $200,000 on hand to spend fighting losing legal battles designed to gather votes, we sure could use it in Franklin County for local educational purposes, or road and bridge improvements, or incentives for economic expansion.
When a doctor charges a patient to 'cure' an ailment that doesn't exist, that's called fraud. Sadly, when a Montgomery politician seeks to 'cure' a legal problem that doesn't exist, we call that courageous.
