Pagan Weddings Legal in Ireland
Pagan weddings have become legal in Ireland.
Following a five-year campaign the Irish state has now recognized the right of the Pagan Federation Ireland to perform weddings.
Makes me happy for those Irish pagans. All the luck: they get to be Irish and pagan and now, married too!
Oh, I kid. I like America; I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. But it’s hard to imagine pagan weddings being recognized here.
ETA: Well, I have been set straight, I surely have. I stand corrected, and evidently the difficulty of imagining it in America is entirely on my part. Thanks for letting me know.
February 24, 2010 at 11:52 pm
Actually, because of the residual frontier mentality here in the United States, most places have pretty liberal laws on who can officiate at weddings. Generally speaking, if the person is recognized by a religious institution as being empowered to officiate, that’s good enough in many states, and most aren’t going to quibble about the particular theological tenets of the church (or coven) in question.
February 25, 2010 at 6:23 am
For that matter, wherever you live, you can always go through the civil ceremony to get the piece of paper, and then invite your friends and family to whatever form of ceremony you really want to put your heart into. Who cares whether the state recognizes it or not? You’ve already given them their pound of flesh.
And although that land is brimming over with fairies, they still don’t recognize gay marriage.
February 25, 2010 at 8:59 am
When I was married, it was in a pagan fashion. We’ve had the ability to be married by pagan rites in the US for, as far as I can tell, our entire existence as a nation.
February 25, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Hey, I’ve been authorized to do marriages as a Pagan priest in Ohio for some 25 years. The US doesn’t have ‘religious’ marriage, unlike Ireland. All unions are civil unions – they just happen to allow clergy to be one of the categories of authorised marriers.