This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2004, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Three candidates who would be Utah's attorney general have passed a key test for anyone who wants to be your lawyer. They have told their clients something that they may not have wanted to hear.
Incumbent Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and challengers Greg Skordas and Andrew McCullough issued a remarkable joint statement Friday opposing the anti-gay marriage amendment to the Utah Constitution that will appear on the November ballot. Not because of what people may think it says, but because of the thing that we have lawyers for:
The fine print.
The three candidates are all over the lot on the supposed focus of Amendment 3 - banning gay marriage. Republican Shurtleff favors such a ban, and thus is going out on a political limb to advise against this particular measure. Libertarian McCullough opposes any ban. Democrat Skordas, so far, is straddling.
But all three have firmly trained their legal Hi-Liters on a part of the ballot question that, they say, is not only unnecessarily hurtful to many Utahns and their families, but also lawsuit bait that could leave any Utah attorney general defending the indefensible in federal court.
The first part of the amendment would do what the state code already does, and which other state constitutions do or may do after November. It says, Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman.
But then comes Part 2, the part that gives the lawyers the heebie-jeebies: No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.
That, the candidates agree, could not only restrict the legal honorific of marriage but also forbid laws, rules, even private contracts, extending joint property ownership, parental rights, employee benefits, medical decision-making, wills and trusts to any but legally married couples. Those deprived would not only be the same-sex couples the amendment is supposedly aimed at, but also Utah's thousands of heterosexual common-law marriages - existing households whose legal underpinning could be destroyed by passage of the amendment.
Even most conservative Republicans don't want that.
The sponsors of the amendment, Sen. Chris Buttars and Rep. LaVar Christensen, insist that the would-be attorneys general are alarmist and that the Part 2 is necessary to make Part 1 stick. But one wonders how the backers know that, given that the amendment was rushed through the closing hours of the last legislative session without any expert review whatsoever.
The voters, at least, now have some expert advice on the matter before them. However people vote on Amendment 3, they should do so with that counsel in mind.-