In an 11-page opinion  in Center for Inquiry v. Marion Circuit Court Clerk, a panel of the Seventh Circuit has held Indiana Code §31-11-6-1 violates the First Amendment. The provision specifies who can solemnize a marriage and includes “religious officials designated by religious groups but omits equivalent officials of secular groups such as humanist societies.” The plaintiffs, a humanist group and a leader of the group deemed a “secular celebrant,” were not allowed to solemnize a marriage unless they obtained clergy credentials or “called themselves a religion.”

Judge Easterbrook, writing for the unanimous panel, stated that it is unconstitutional to make distinctions between “religious and secular beliefs that hold the same place in adherents’ lives,” citing the well-known conscientious objector cases of Welsh and Seeger, as well as Torasco v. Watkins, and the Seventh Circuit precedent regarding accommodations for atheists in prison. There is not, Easterbrook wrote, an “ability to favor religions over non-theistic groups that have moral stances that are equivalent to theistic ones except for non- belief in God or unwillingness to call themselves religions.”