A recent state Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts has officially declared that any man or woman involved in a civil union in Vermont must get that union dissolved before he or she can get married to another person in Massachusetts. Essentially, this means that the state of Massachusetts recognizes that civil unions are just as binding as marriages are. Court records say that the Massachusetts judges think that civil unions are the equivalent of marriages in the Commonwealth, and that if someone does not dissolve their union before marrying that person is committing the crime of polygamy.
Polygamy is illegal in the entire Unites States, and is punishable by fines up to $10,000 and up to 1 year in prison in most states. In Utah, where the crime is more common, polygamy is fined by $5,000. In New York, people can be sent to prison for up to 4 years for a polygamous or bigamous marriage. Usually the crime is evaluated as a per-count crime. Therefore, a person in New York who is married to three spouses could end up getting two counts of polygamy, rather than just one. The Constitution prohibits marrying more than one person, though the action is often practiced in other countries.
Some American jurisdictions also prohibit a polygamous lifestyle. This occurs when a person lives with more than one person of the opposite sex and has an ongoing sexual and otherwise martial relationship with multiple men or women. However, the laws against the polygamous are rarely enforced unless the offender tries to make the unions legal through obtaining a marriage certificate. Even if you are not living with two spouses, if you are married to one person, you cannot marry another. This law is fixed, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you live with your spouse. Now, in the case with Massachusetts and Vermont, some states are also saying that you cannot remarry if you are still legally involved in a civil union.
Not to fear, if you are in a civil union there is a way to get the relationship dissolved through using a family court. Sometime you will need to split property, deal with child custody, and work through spousal support or alimony agreements as a result. This is because many people in civil unions have acted as if they were married for years. When sharing life together, they may have created a lot of jointly-owned property or come to rely on each other for finances. This means that their estate will need to be settled much like a divorce would be.
Massachusetts created their ruling about civil unions after two men were married in Massachusetts in 205 and determined that they were going to get a divorce. During the divorce, one of the men found that his ex had been in a civil union in Vermont that was never technically dissolved. Because of that, the family judge had to dismiss the case, saying that the marriage was void because of the civil union. In the official ruling, the men had never technically married because of the previous union.
The spouse who was in the civil union argued that when Vermont repealed parts of it’s civil union laws in 2009, it would have changed his circumstances. In Vermont, the state allowed homosexuals to marry that year. Yet it did not convert pre-existing civil unions into marriages. Judges did not uphold that argument, and instead said that recognizing Vermont civil unions as marriages would help to avoid any uncertainty that could result from detailed arguments. If you are currently in a civil union and are planning to marry another person, or have questions about the implications of your civil unions in other states, then talk to a family lawyer for more information.