New Hampshire state representative Maureen Mooney has introduced a bill to ban recogniton of out-of-state civil unions and same-sex marriages, but she has publicly misrepresented the bill’s purpose.

The bill, H.B. 1415, would amend the recognition provision of New Hampshire’s new civil union law. The provision currently requires recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages and civil unions as civil unions for purposes of New Hampshire law. The bill would amend the provision to expressly forbid this recognition.

Mooney, who opposed the civil union law itself, has publicly misrepresented the bill’s purpose. As paraphrased by SeacoastOnline, a New Hampshire news source, Mooney says she is concerned that without her amendment the current law will “open the door for other kinds of couples, like a boyfriend and a girlfriend, to enter into a civil union out-of-state and then move to New Hampshire.”

All Mooney’s bill would do, however, is expressly bar recognition of out-of-state civil unions or marriages between members of the same sex. The recognition provision, which she would convert from a mandate to a prohibition by simply adding the word “not,” is expressly limited to only same-sex couples. Mooney’s bill does not address recognition of foreign opposite-sex unions.

Her public rationale for the bill appears to be disingenuous. It would be a simple matter to enact language that bars recognition of out-of-state, non-marital unions between women and men. Instead, her bill targets recognition of only same-sex unions.

Why strip same-sex couples of recognition in order to prevent recognition of opposite-sex unions? The only possible explanation would seem to be a fear that a court would deem it unconstitutional to recognize foreign same-sex civil unions but not foreign opposite-sex civil unions and would remedy the constitutional violation by ordering recognition of foreign opposite-sex unions. But New Hampshire’s public policy in favor of steering opposite-sex couples into marriage, if itself constitutional, would almost certainly provide a constitutionally satisfactory justification for refusing recognition to foreign opposite-sex statuses that would give opposite-sex couples an alternative to marriage. In the end, Mooney’s argument sounds like a flimsy attempt to claim that same-sex unions somehow undermine opposite-sex marriage.

The existing provision is an eminently sensible one that avoids requiring same-sex couples joined in civil unions in places like Vermont and Connecticut from having to re-formalize their civil unions in New Hampshire in order to be recognized as a legal couple there. Its conversion of a foreign same-sex marriage into a New Hampshire civil union also provides the same practical benefit to couples in same-sex marriages without requiring New Hampshire to recognize their unions as marriages.

See also my overview of New Hampshire conflicts law.