Tamar Courtney and Morgan Strong have been together for six years and will be getting married this summer in Virginia. They wanted a friend to officiate the ceremony but after facing some difficulties in obtaining his license, they figured they would just go to the county courthouse and take care of the legal paperwork. The formal ceremony with family and friends would just have to come at a later date.
For weeks, they tried contacting the Roanoke County Courthouse for information… to no avail. So they went to neighboring Franklin County instead. A judge there referred them to two court-appointed individuals, either of whom could perform a civil ceremony.
They contacted the first officiant, Bud Roth, and he told them he couldn’t perform the ceremony on courthouse grounds (for unknown reasons) but he could do it at his church.
Even though Tamar’s an Agnostic and Morgan’s an atheist, they just wanted to get the legal part of the ceremony over with, so they accepted his offer. After working out the cost, location, date, and time, Roth asked Tamar about the couple’s religious denomination.
She told him the truth: they weren’t religious. And that’s when Roth backed away.
Because Morgan didn’t believe in God and Tamar “didn’t know where God was,” he said they didn’t have a right to get married.
Does that sound crazy?
Morgan certainly couldn’t believe it, so he called Roth up himself to verify what his fiancee had told him… and wisely videotaped the conversation:
Living in Anglo-America 