Panel to examine minister certification rules

Thursday, Dec. 28, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

Clark County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre says she will form a committee to examine controversial regulations that would have required criminal background checks on ministers who perform marriages.

Parraguirre on Wednesday suspended the new regulations that were to take effect Monday. That afternoon, on POV Vegas, the Sun's daily news discussion show on Cox Communications cable TV channels 1 and 39, she announced the formation of a committee made up of representatives from her office, the American Civil Liberties Union, the district attorney's office and local clergy.

"We will look at the state statutes (33-year-old laws on which the recent local regulations were enacted) to see if they need to be rewritten or if additional regulations" from the Legislature are needed, Parraguirre said.

She noted that the controversy that has brewed since she announced the new rules before Christmas convinced her to take a second look at the matter. They were the first such regulations dealing with certification for the area's more than 1,500 ministers who are licensed to perform marriages.

Both the new rules, which also would have required ministers to have their permits to perform marriages renewed every five years, and Metro Police background probes of ministers applying for licenses, are on hold, she said.

Parraguirre said she was merely trying to set regulations to support a state law that is vague yet places the burden of regulating the lucrative Las Vegas marriage industry on her shoulders.

The law requires her to be satisfied that licenses are not being issued to people convicted of felonies in the last 10 years. Without written regulations that were recommended by the District Attorney's office, Parraguirre said that she was not satisfied she could meet that standard.

Also appearing with Parraguirre on the TV show was the Rev. Massey Gentry, director of the Clark County Ministerial Association, who said he knew of no one on the executive board of his multi-denominational committee who supported the new regulations.

He also questions why such an antiquated state law is still on the books.

"Frankly, I'm not sure that someone who drives here ... to have a wedding in a drive-thru window would care one way or the other if the minister was a convicted felon," Gentry said.

Las Vegas religious leaders and others say the new regulations are akin to a government-issued "work card" for ministers to perform a sacrament.

"This is clearly not a proper function of government," Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU, told POV Vegas moderator Mark Shaffer. "It's a bad place for government to be."

Gentry said ironically the state law that led to the county regulation was championed by a Las Vegas minister of the past who told legislators he feared that unqualified people could perform marriages and that the industry needed laws to prevent that from happening.