Talk:Legal status of the Universal Life Church

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I believe that this page is erroniously titled and should either be renamed "Legal Status of the Universal Church in the United States", include information from other parts of the world (If applicable) or at least recognise the lack of information.RevNTheogen (talk) 19:50, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

I am in the process of fixing a few broken links here, and linking to non-affiliated websites. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.215.247 (talk) 22:23, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Broken links and Bad quality.

Many of the links on this page to the PDF's of the Attorney General Opinions are broken. Minor editing, linking to the governmental websites should reduce clutter. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimmydeandean (talk • contribs) 22:40, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

A stub?

Wouldn’t this page fit better as a section of the ULC wiki page instead of attempting to stand on its own? Kdmckale (talk) 22:29, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

Huge gobs of original research

Most of the state-by-state listings of the legal status end with the unsourced claim of "which therefore includes those ordained as ministers of the ULC." That appears to be Wikipedia giving our own analysis of the law, which we are not supposed to do. Reading law is a tricky thing, much of the legal establishment exists to fight over what each statement means and how it applies to given situations. Barring specific coverage in articles or at least caselaw, we cannot say how this law applies to ULC ministers. This is actually very dangerous original research, as we are telling people that the marriage that they are in or intend to enter is legal. I am about to go through and delete entries sourced only to citations from the legal code. --Nat Gertler (talk) 14:32, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

If your objection is to that conclusion, why not just remove that part? The law clearly says what it says, and the extraordinary claim would be that ULC ministers are not allowed to perform weddings, since only a handful of states have decided such a thing. Let me know if you have any objection to restoring the text with that language removed. Cheers! bd2412 T 15:34, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

I absolutely do have objections. Once we've stripped off the claim that it applies to ULC, it is not a statement on the legal status of ULC-led weddings, and the placement of it in the article creates a suggestion that it is. If this were an article on "requirements for ministry of weddings", that would be a different thing (and that might be an interesting article that could be linked to from here.) The states for which we know there have been rulings on ULC for weddings go both ways; it is a mistake to assume that just because it hasn't been tested, it must be okay. --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:08, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

It would be trivially easy to find sources indicating that weddings had been performed in each state by ULC-ordained ministers, but then the article would be loaded with trivialities at the expense of an absurd amount of labor. Where the plain language of a statute allows basically anyone to be considered a minister for this purpose, it is WP:THESKYISBLUE that it applies to ULC-ordained ministers. bd2412 T 16:19, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

And I imagine it would've been trivially easy to find marriages that had been performed by ULC ministers in the places that found ULC ministry invalid, up until the time that it was tested in court. That someone has not been caught for it does not therefor make it legal. Easy interpretation of the "plain language" of the law is often not the same as what ends up being the legal situation once it's evaluated in court. --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:37, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

I don't see this being particularly different to the objection that a source is needed to show that most people have all of their fingers (an objection which has been litigated in Wikipedia before). The objection presumes that the marriages are invalid because in most states they have never been challenged, because the people performing them have "not been caught". That is much more of an imposition of OR than describing the statutes, which say for example that a marriage can be performed by "the pastor of any religious society according to the rules ordained or custom established by such society". To require proof that there is not some exception for ULC ministers would be absurd. bd2412 T 17:51, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

"The objection presumes that the marriages are invalid because in most states they have never been challenged" - no, it does not. It presumes that we don't know whether they are invalid, because we don't know whether the specific question of whether a ULC ordination is sufficient has ever been tested in that jurisdiction. To assume that "the pastor of any religious society" applies to ministers of the ULC assumes that the law would judge the ULC to be a "religious society" (as we see in New York, it's a question whether ULC qualifies as a "church") and that a "ULC minister" is a "pastor", which would be brought severely into question by some definitions of "pastor", which specify it as a Christian position. We should not be building an article around your assumption of how law would be interpreted. Reliable sources are called for. --Nat Gertler (talk) 18:40, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

You will be satisfied, then, with a law review article wherein the author states that they have conducted jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction analysis of cases where the validity of such marriages have been challenged? Or do you actually want proof of the negative? bd2412 T 18:53, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

If we have a good reliable-for-the-law relevant-to-the-ULC source, then we can report what that source says. It does not mean, however, that we can assume that it is legal anywhere where there has not been a specific challenge, unless the source makes that assertion. --Nat Gertler (talk) 20:40, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

I am satisfied that the source provided suffices for this purpose. The author purports to provide a detailed jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction analysis of cases in which the validity of online-minister marriages have been challenged, and lists the handful of states specified. bd2412 T 20:48, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Then we can do away with separate entries for all the other states, and just leave the states where it has been challenged as a states-where-it-had-been-challenged-as-of-2011 section, rather than quoting all the laws whether or not they were the law in place when that study was done in 2011. The rest is bulk not cited to sources showing its relevancy to the ULC. --Nat Gertler (talk) 20:57, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

That would be a waste of the tremendous amount of research and writing that I put into building all the information in the first place, and a disservice to readers who won't know whether the missing states are omitted because they have nothing interesting to say, or because no one has done the work to see what they say. I have done the work. I am also looking now for additional state-by-state sources to shore up these points, and it will be a pain to have to go back in the page history and restore each point as additional citations for the states are added. As to the study being as-of-2011, that is a fairly recent date relative to an entity that has been operating since the 1960s. If there was a change in status between then and now, I would have found it in my research, which included searching the usual legal databases for cases on the subject for all states. bd2412 T 21:02, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Then transfer all that to an article about Marriage Officiant Laws In The U.S., where each entry is inherently relevant, rather than assumption of relevance on the ULC page where we cannot say how it applies. That page could definitely be linked to here, and we could certainly say that Grossman found a lack of challenges in the other jurisdictions. But that material does not show sign of belonging on this particular page. --Nat Gertler (talk) 21:09, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

I have no objection to there also being a separate article addressing such laws generally, but my research was specific to the ULC (and Grossman's review was specific to the ULC precisely because she identified it as the entity most likely to run into this issue). I wouldn't send readers to another article for information on this specific subject that can be covered here. I am thinking, however, that perhaps it would be more digestible if the information was in a table rather than fifty individual sections. bd2412 T 21:14, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Except your findings weren't at all specific to ULC for the vast majority of states. You just quoted the law with only your supposition of how it applies to ULC. Those aren't special ULC laws, and I see no sign that there was some specific-to-ULC source that pointed you to most of those laws. In addition, despite your earlier claims, I'm not finding any statement in the Grossman article that all the states she listed as having cases are the only ones to do so. Can you point me to such a quote? (The closest I find is "In this column, I will discuss cases from several states that have invalidated marriages that were solemnized only by ministers ordained through the mail or online, with a special focus on New York, where the validity of such marriages is especially doubtful." But it does not say these were the only states where it happened... and her conclusion flies in the face of your earlier assumption that we should assume the ULC marriages are legal in the other states.) --Nat Gertler (talk) 22:51, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

I referenced Grossman's exact words above: "I will provide a detailed jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction analysis of cases in which the validity of online-minister marriages have been challenged". I don't see how anything more definitive than that can rationally be asked for. With respect to the state-by-state research, I specifically searched each state for any case in which ULC ordination had been challenged or even mentioned. In some cases, this was remarked in obiter dicta amid the listing of organizations able to solemnify marriages. bd2412 T 22:59, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Authority to solemnize marriage and perform other religious ceremonies

Where is a paragraph "Rest of World"? Americocentrism at its best. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:C0:DF17:7B00:3943:B907:49AC:5E26 (talk) 00:30, 20 February 2022 (UTC)