David Fowler Interprets the Marital Contract Recording Act

Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed former Tennessee Senator David Fowler to the newsmaker line to go into further details regarding the marital consent bill.

Leahy: Now we have David Fowler on our newsmaker line, who wants to talk about the, I guess, the marital consent bill. He’ll give us the details on that. We discussed it a little bit yesterday.

I called it, I’ll say I was unenthusiastic about it. And David, quickly, disagreed with that characterization of it. David, welcome to The Tennessee Star Report. Thanks for joining us today.

Fowler: Thank you. Sorry I got confused on where your studio was this morning, but thank you for the opportunity.

Leahy: We’re glad to have you on the newsmaker line. Tell us about the bill and tell us the bill number, where it stands, and what you seek to accomplish with it.

Fowler: The bill number is Senate Bill 562, House Bill 233. It’s in the House Civil Justice Committee today, and if it were to pass out, it would be on the Senate floor tomorrow. But it’s called the Marital Contract Recording Act, and it rests on a very simple premise.

Is marriage between a man and a woman a thing the government created by virtuous statutes or not? That’s what the bill is. Now before people answer the question to say, well, of course it’s statutes, well, then appreciate the fact that if the statutes were repealed, that means marriage would no longer exist and men and women would look at each other and say “I don’t know what we do here.

“There’s no government that lets us get married. I guess we can’t.” Now, the argument that has been made against the bill is that the government hasn’t sanctioned this. It hasn’t licensed these parties to be married.

And to be honest, that’s about the most statist thing I’ve ever heard coming from Republicans in my life because they enter into common-law private contracts every day. I bet you every one of them has rented a condo somewhere.

I bet every one of them has hired somebody to do lawn service or pest removal or pressure-wash their house or maybe hire somebody to work on their newspaper or something like that.

All of those are private common-law contracts where the parties have not been licensed by the government to enter into those contracts.

So essentially what we’re saying is there’s really one kind of contract at common law that the government has to license because people are smart enough to lease property, to employ people to hire services, to get vacation rentals.

But they’re not smart enough to decide whether to get married or not. And the government shouldn’t enforce their promises that create rights, even though they would enforce an employment agreement between an attorney and his client or a newspaper reporter and his reporters.

Or a TV station or radio station and its reporters and employees. Or the guy that just comes in, pressure-washes his house, or like Jeremy Faison, who provides services for pest control.

Now we would expect the government to uphold those promises made in those private contracts between unlicensed parties, but not marriage.

Listen to the interview:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “David Fowler” by Brian Stansberry. CC BY 3.0. Background Photo “Tennessee Capitol” by FaceMePLS. CC BY 2.0.