Man sues to ease
process of taking wife's
last name
By AP from the Home
News Tribune Online, January 13, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- Mike Buday
isn't married to his last name. In fact, he and his fiancee decided before
they wed that he would take hers.
But Buday was stunned to learn that he couldn't simply become Mike Bijon when
they married in 2005.
As in most other states, that would require some bureaucratic paperwork well
beyond what a woman must go through to change her name when marrying.
Instead of completing the expensive, time-consuming process, Buday and his wife,
Diana Bijon, enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a
discrimination lawsuit against the state of California. They claim the
difficulty faced by a husband seeking to change his name violates the equal
protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU in Southern California, said it is
the first federal lawsuit of its kind in the country.
Only six states -- Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York and North
Dakota -- have statutes establishing equal name-change processes for men and
women when they marry. In California and other states, men cannot choose a
different last name while filing a marriage license.
In California, a man who wants to take his wife's name must file a petition, pay
more than $300, place a public notice for weeks in a local newspaper and then
appear before a judge.
Because of Buday's case, a California state lawmaker has introduced a bill to
put a space on the marriage license for either spouse to change names.
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