Couple Must Prove New Mexico Is A State To Get A Marriage License

WASHINGTON, DC — Getting a marriage license sure seemed like it would be a snap for Gavin Clarkson, who knows a lot about how the process works both as a lawyer and a recent candidate for New Mexico secretary of state. But when the Las Cruces man and his then-fiancée were visiting Washington, D.C., earlier this month and applied for their marriage license, they hit a snag neither saw coming.

Clarkson had to prove New Mexico, which was admitted to the union in 1912, is a state. For real. He showed his New Mexico driver’s license. That wasn’t good enough. Because he looked like he might be a foreign citizen, the clerk at the District of Columbia Courts Marriage Bureau said he would have to show his New Mexico passport, and the clerk’s supervisor agreed — which was wrong. New Mexico is a state, not a country.

Clarkson posted about the 20-minute ordeal on Facebook.

“You know you are from flyover country when you are applying for a marriage license, give them your New Mexico driver's license, and they come back and say ‘my supervisor says we cannot accept international driver's licenses. Do you have a New Mexico passport?’ They went back to a supervisor to check if New Mexico was a state ... TWICE!”

Finally, the clerk and supervisor conceded that New Mexico is, indeed, a state and Clarkson and his fiancée, Marina, got the District of Columbia’s official go-ahead to get married.

“The new Mrs. Clarkson thinks the most hilarious part was when the clerk complimented me on my English,” Clarkson wrote on Facebook, giving a nod to a bit of irony in the situation: It wasn't Marina, who immigrated from Argentina in 1994, whose legal status was questioned. For the record, she became a U.S. citizen 14 years later.

The wedding in Washington, where Marina lives, went off without a hitch, and the couple are seeing the humor. Clarkson told the Las Cruces News-Sun the mixup about New Mexico’s statehood was “a comical moment in the whole process.”

He realized later that he could have cleared up the situation if he had shown his tribal ID as a member of the Choctaw Nation.

The D.C. court system apologized for the error in an emailed statement to the News-Sun:

“We understand that a clerk in our Marriage Bureau made a mistake regarding New Mexico’s 106-year history as a state,” Leah H. Gurowitz, director of media and public relations for D.C. Courts, wrote. “We very much regret the error and the slight delay it caused a New Mexico resident in applying for a DC marriage license.”

Clarkson has lived in New Mexico since 2012. He ran for secretary of state in the midterm election.

Photo via Shutterstock