Weddings I’ve Turned Down

As of May 2010, after over ten years of doing weddings in Las Vegas I can say that I have refused to do a wedding only eight times.

Four times because either the bride or the groom or both were drunk. No brainer, when one of them can’t stand and can’t vow to do anything that they will remember in the morning, I tell them to come back when they are sober. One of the times the Wedding Chapel was full of people and we had to cancel. One of the times they got into a limo and went to another chapel and go married there. But all four times the Chapel I was working at supported me in that decision and I appreciated them for it.

I have turned down two weddings because the groom refused to let me talk to the bride. Here’s the picture for both of them. Groom in his late fifties or early sixties. The bride is in her early twenties and usually from a former Soviet Eastern Bloc country like Croatia or Belarus. I know she can speak English because she is allowed to talk to the Wedding Planners but not allowed to talk to me before the wedding. One of the guys literally stood in between us and held her behind him. I will not do a wedding where I am not comfortable that there is no coercion on either part.

One of the weddings I’ve turned down was when the bride and groom got into a serious fight right before the wedding. They were seriously yelling at each other and in each other’s faces with finger pointing. I don’t remember what they were fighting about but it was serious. I finally broke them up and asked them if they still wanted to get married. They both said “YES!” with all their anger directed at me and I told them it was time to sit down and talk. We talked, they got angry at each other again, and I told them this wasn’t the right time.

The last wedding I’ve turned down was a result of family and not the bride and groom. They walked down the aisle together just as the separated mom and dad started to get into a fight over which was to “present” the bride. Instead of disengaging from the situation the bride got into the fight and it got into who paid for this and who said that and it was just a mess. The groom turns to me and says, “Maybe we should do this later”

All the chapels I work at know that I don’t do “commitment ceremonies” whether they are for gay couples or, more often, straight couples who for one reason or another don’t want the paper, just the ceremony. I turn those down whenever I am confronted with them because, basically, they are asking me for a license to sleep with each other or asking me to bless them living together. I won’t do that.