By The Way...

Tuesday, January 16, 2007
5:54:00 AM EST
Hearing Nothing at the moment.
A couple of crazy kids decided to get married, but rather than the wife automatically taking the husband's last name, they decided to try something a little different:

Greg Marshall and Adrienne Foley, married in Levin on Saturday, played 18 holes of minigolf to decide who would relinquish their surname.

Wearing a bridal dress, Ms Foley had clothing to battle with as well as her husband's form. "Greg's a keen golfer. He's been playing since pretty much forever," she said.

Perhaps that was why she chose to engage in a few psychological games before the big event. "For about five months, I'd been going round the house saying, `Gregory James Foley, that sounds good'."

You'll need to click through to see who got whose name. I know, I'm a stinker that way.

Apropos to this, a couple in California is suing that state because while it's incredibly easy for a wife to change her last name to her husband's, it's rather more difficult to go the other way 'round:

Before Michael Buday married his fiancée, Diana Bijon, he decided to honor her family by bucking tradition and taking her last name. But, it wasn't so easy.Under California state law, he needed to pay more than $300, go to court, file a petition, and publicly advertise his name change for four weeks in a local newspaper. If he had simply gone along with tradition, it would have cost only $50 to $80.

So Buday, 29, went to court, along with the ACLU, to change the law. They recently announced their plans to sue the California Department of Health Services, which oversees marriage licenses and name changes...

California is one of 44 states with unequal name change laws for people getting married. Right now, only six states — Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North Dakota — explicitly allow a man to change his name through marriage with the same ease as a woman can.

I think this is a case California should lose -- I can't think of any particularly good reason why a man shouldn't be able to change is last name to his wife's with any more difficulty than a wife has changing her name to her husband's. As it happens I was married in California (it's where I lived at the time), and while I never seriously entertained taking my wife's last name (even Krissy agrees I'm just not "John Blauser"), it should have been no less onerous an option for me to choose.

Your thoughts? Should men and women have the same process to change their last name to that of their spouse?


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This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)

• #3 Comment from monponsett 
  1/17/07 12:17 AM | Permalink

  My daughter Melissa isn't named "Grace" because I beat my husband at Madden on the XBox while we were playing for high stakes.
• #2 Comment from princesssaurora 
  1/16/07 10:42 PM | Permalink

  Yes, it should be just as easy for one at marriage as the other. Otherwise there is no real equality is there?
  
  be well,
  Dawn
  
  
• #1 Comment from plittle 
  1/16/07 8:31 AM | Permalink

  Absolutely! That law is as anachronistic as the laws preventing gay marriage. The constitution says all people are equal. One day, you Americans should start following your own founding documents.
  -Paul
  http://journals.aol.ca/plittle/AuroraWalkingVacation/