Texas won’t let a married gay couple get divorced. Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West explain the importance of the case:
[The couple, identified in court documents as “J.B.” and “H.B.”,] can ask that their marriage be declared “void.” In other words, the state is willing to declare that their marriage never existed in the first place. Thus while the men wish to check the “divorced” box, the state is offering a chance to check the “never married” box instead. No harm, no foul.
But this is a transparently flawed solution. The fact is that these two men were married. Texas is trying to retroactively declare that a marriage deemed valid in Massachusetts was never real. And while a state’s ability to be hostile and dismissive to the desires of same-sex couples is still under debate throughout this country, a state’s inability to be hostile and dismissive to the legal declarations of other states is a pretty settled matter.
Simply voiding the marriage creates its own problems. The spouses might have had children or accumulated joint property and debt. Extinguishing the marriage from its outset would flush those legal rights down the drain. Children who were born or adopted to such marriages, for example, could find their legal rights vis-à-vis their parents brought into question. A spouse who raised those children while the other worked or went to school, meanwhile, might have no claim to alimony. As one court has put it, retroactively invalidating marriages would “disrupt thousands of actions taken … by same-sex couples, their employers, their creditors, and many others, throwing property rights into disarray, destroying the legal interests and expectations of … couples and their families, and potentially undermining the ability of citizens to plan their lives.”
The Dish 