A Tennessee Chancery Court Judge, in what can only be described as a fit of judicial pique, last week used a divorce case in which he had substantial doubt about the parties' credibility to launch a verbal attack on the U.S. Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision and develop a rather far-fetched theory of the decision's impact. In
Bumgardner v. Bumgardner, (TN Chan., Aug. 31, 2015), the court said in part:
With the U.S. Supreme Court having defined what must be recognized as a marriage, it would appear that Tennessee' s judiciary must now await the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court as to what is not a marriage, or better stated, when a marriage is no longer a marriage. The majority' s opinion in Obergefell, regardless of its patronizing and condescending verbiage, is now the law of the land....
Thus, it appears there may now be, at minimum ... concurrent jurisdiction between the state and federal courts with regard to marriage/divorce litigation. Perhaps even more troubling, however, is that there may also now be a new or enhanced field of jurisprudence— federal preemption by " judicial fiat." ...
[R]egardless of the states' traditional regulation of the area of marriage and divorce..., what actually appears to be the intent and ( more importantly) the effect of the Supreme Court ruling is to preempt state courts from addressing marriage/ divorce litigation altogether. ...
The conclusion reached by this Court is that Tennesseans, corporately, have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to be incompetent to define and address such keystone/ central institutions such as marriage and, thereby, at minimum, contested divorces. Consequently, since only our federal courts are wise enough to address the issues of marriage— and therefore contested divorces— it only follows that this Court' s jurisdiction has been preempted. ...
Although this Court has some vague familiarity with the governmental theories of democracy, republicanism, socialism, communism, fascism, theocracy, and even despotism, implementation of this apparently new "super -federal -judicial" form of benign and benevolent government, termed " krytocracy" by some and " judi-idiocracy" by others, with its iron fist and limp wrist, represents quite a challenge for a state level trial court. In any event, it should be noted that the victory of personal rights and liberty over the intrusion of state government provided by the majority opinion in Obergefell is held by this Court only to have divested subject matter jurisdiction from this Court when a divorce is contested.
Huffington Post reports on the decision.
