General legal information furnished as a service of Fort Lauderdale / West Palm Beach family law attorney Janet Langjahr
Oklahoma couple gets a divorce. Then divorce is, uh, canceled.
It was an uncontested divorce. That means the parties had agreed on everything.
Those are typically informal affairs, hurried along before the presiding judge.
In this instance, only one party, with counsel, appeared at the hearing, the pronouns contained in the papers misled or confused as to gender, and no one mentioned to the judge that the couple were lesbians.
Until a reporter called the judge.
Oklahoma law not only prohibits homosexual marriages in the state but also explicitly prohibits recognition of homosexual marriages legally performed elsewhere.
So, once the judge realized what he had done, he voided the divorce he had granted.
The parties actually appealed, but the voiding of the divorce was upheld.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court did however rule that the parties should have been afforded a hearing first - and remanded for that hearing to be held. Although it appears that it was doomed to be an exercise in futility.
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