Judges in PA are invalidating marriages that are performed by clergy who do not regularly minster to or preach in a physical church. How can you retroactively invalidate a marriage when they was no law against it at the time? It is a sad day when the state dictates what type of clergy can marry someone! And it’s so vague, what is “regularly?” Do they make allowances for sabbaticals? The Franciscan monk who married us was on sabbatical, would that be a problem is I lived in PA (though, I wouldn’t have to worry about it because the minister of a United Methodist church married us as well).

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed the first three lawsuits today in a planned statewide challenge of a recent judicial declaration stating that marriages are invalid if presided over by a minister who does not regularly serve a church or preach in a physical house of worship. The ruling potentially endangers thousands of marriages in Pennsylvania.
“What we want is to fix a problem that never should have existed in the first place,” said Mary Catherine Roper, staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “The state has no business invalidating marriages just because it doesn’t like the kind of minister who officiated them.”
The lawsuits were filed on behalf of three couples who were married in Pennsylvania by clergy who do not regularly preach in a church or to an established congregation. The couples seek judicial declarations that their marriages are valid under Pennsylvania law.
ACLU plaintiffs Ryan and Melanie Hancock were married in 2005 by a friend who is an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. They chose that officiant, in part, because the couple grew up in different religious traditions and did not want to favor one tradition over the other. A copy of their lawsuit can be found online at: http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/Hancockfinalcomplaint.doc
“Our marriage was perfectly legal at the time it was entered into,” Ryan Hancock said. “My wife and I continue to be happily married to this day. For a judge to retroactively decide, nearly three years later, that our marriage is no longer valid seems unfair and is hurtful for both of us.”
The issue arose in September 2007 when York County Judge Maria Musti Cook ruled that the marriage of Dorie Heyer and Jacob Hollerbush was invalid because it had been performed by a minister of the Universal Life Church who obtained his ordination over the Internet. In Heyer v. Hollerbush, the court held that the marriage never existed because the minister who solemnized it did not serve a congregation or preach in a physical house of worship.
Since that decision, registers of wills in counties throughout the commonwealth have been telling prospective couples and couples already married that marriages performed by ministers who do not serve a congregation or place of worship are not valid. Bucks County Register of Wills Barbara Reilly has even urged couples to get remarried if their officiant did not regularly serve a congregation.