I’ve wondered about this for a while, and in the last few days I’ve heard a few other folks wonder about it aloud–which is sometimes called a trial balloon, depending on who’s doing the wondering.
Let’s separate church and state here:
The State:
is no longer able to offer a religious rite, as it is not a religious organization. It can however, offer a civil recognition of a couple’s commitment, which would provide all the legal advantages and disadvantages of what we currently call marriage.
Churches
will not have the civil authority to change a couple’s legal status, as they are not civil institutions, but, of course, will be the only institution to bless the couple’s commitment in a religious rite of marriage.
This may have been debated before, but I can’t find a recent thread that speaks directly to it, especially after Vermont and Iowa. If there is, I’ll happily defer.
Isn’t this exactly the situation as it exists now? You can go to whatever house of worship you like and get some holy person to mumble whatever magic words you like, but the legal marriage isn’t formed (nor can it be dissolved) until you fill out some perfectly banal and entirely agnostic paperwork and hand it to some government clerk.
I’ve heard this a lot recently, that the state should get out of marriage altogether and offer civil unions to gays and straights alike, and that “marriage” should be the provenance of religious groups. My biggest problem with this, as I alluded to yesterday in another thread, is that it does to atheists what we now do to gay people - takes the term marriage away from them. If it’s not good enough for two gay men to be “civil unioned”, why is it good enough for two atheists to be “civil unioned”?
Like it or not, “married” is the holy grail here. Everyone who wants to publicly sanction their deep romantic long term affection for another person wants the “married” title. So I think the opposite terminology would be best - “marriage” should be the state institution and “religious union” the sacred one.
Of course, that works only so long as “religious union” doesn’t become the more high status title.
That’s the confusion here in the States (I don’t know how you folks up north handle it). According to both conservative and liberal Christian communities here, marriage is a religious rite. Yet we have to go to the civil government to get a marriage license. What I’m proposing is that the civil government can endow the couple with a change in legal status, but neither Justices of the Peace nor judges, nor even (romantically) ship captains in international waters, can “marry” a couple. Nor could clergy enact a civil event, which they do now–the state issues the license, but the clergy officiating is actually seen in US civil law as an official of the state, granting “married” status on the couple. Currently in the States, in a wedding, the officiating clergy conveys both the civil and the religious change of status to the couple. In my proposal the state would do one, and the clergy could do the other, if the couple wanted.
Because if everyone’s legal rights are defined by the rules for civil unions, it’s harder to modify the rules to the detriment of one group but not the other.
Besides, it’s not like the religious groups are going to trademark “Marriage™”, so there’d still be nothing stopping a civil unioned couple calling themselves “married”.
And both conservative and liberal Christian communities are wrong. People have been getting married for thousands of years, in every culture from pre-Christian pagan civilizations to atheistic Communist regimes and everything in between. Certainly conservative and liberal Christians are free to sanctify their marriages with religious rituals as they see fit (as are Jews, Hindus, Wiccans, and anyone else who believes in sanctifying things with religious rituals). They are also free to sanctify their other major life-changing events with religious rituals; baptisms for babies (assuming their particular sect practices infant baptism) and religious funeral rites for the dead. But Christians did not invent marriage, it is not exclusive to Christianity (or any other religion), and the concept of “getting married” is no more the property of Christians to define as they please than are being born or dying.
This is not true. The situation currently existing in the U.S., as Bryan Ekers pointed above, already conforms exactly to your desired arrangement. Upon receiving a marriage license from the state, you are married. Whatever religious ceremony that follows, if one does at all, is neither necessary to consummating the change in marital status nor sufficient to do so (a religious marriage ceremony without a marriage license does not leave you married at its conclusion).
There may be some states where a couple is married simply by obtaining the license, but certainly not all. In my state, you obtain the license and can have a religious ceremony , arrange for a judge or government official to perform a private ceremony or make arrangements to have the ceremony performed a couple days later by a clerk in the marriage license office- but there is some sort of ceremony, even if it only takes 30 seconds. I think **Notassmartasithought ** is proposing a system like that used by some European countries, where everyone has a civil ceremony and some follow it with a religious ceremony.
Are there religious groups who deny that civil marriages are in fact genuine marriages? Are there religious groups who insist that some sort of mumbo-jumbo is required before the marriage is real? Just curious, that’s all.
Good point, which I was thinking of making. The license grants the state; assent to the proposition that you may marry, but the essence of the marriage is the formal public commitment to do so, before witnesses. As everyone is aware, there is also a formal request made for those with objections to the marriage to raise them, a legal requirement. An officiant empowered by the state presides over the public exchange of vows – as you note, we find it convenient to enable a clergyman to merge the duties of servant of the state effectuating a civil marriage with servant of God presiding over a religious rite of matrimony. No reason that need be so, except that it makes little sense for the couple to need to make the same commitment twice, once before the magistrate and once before clergy and congregation, as is done by religious people in France.
Okay, so why the furor over gay marriage, as opposed to gay civil unions? Civil unions aren’t marriage, that’s why. You can’t be a gay man and 100% legitimately and in your heart and the eyes of the state and your grandmother say that you are married to another man. And for a whole lot of people, either for personal or political reasons, that’s not good enough. They want to be married in the eyes of the state, not “just” civil unioned. Even if the two confer identical rights and responsibilities, the word itself has power and is the goal for many people.
You could just as easily say, “Because if everyone’s legal rights are defined by the rules for marriage, it’s harder to modify the rules to the detriment of one group but not the other,” couldn’t you?
I’m not disagreeing that we need to keep or even widen the divide between state and religious marriage. I planned a religious wedding and a state one a year later myself (which, for various reasons, didn’t happen quite that way, but that’s not the point; the point is that its extremely common in my subculture to separate the two very decidedly, often by a year’s span). What I’m disagreeing with is that a state bond should be called a civil union. I think it should be called a marriage.
I think so. My own mother-in-law still refuses to accept that her son and I are “really” married because it wasn’t performed in a Roman Catholic church. Every time she passes her own marriage certificate signed by the Pope, she sighs and says a prayer for us. The fact that I am not Roman Catholic doesn’t seem to affect her point of view. That we have a disparity of relationship (that is, I am unbaptized and he a baptized, though non-practicing, Catholic) and not allowed to marry in the Roman Catholic church seems to escape her, as well.
I know Popes Pious IX and Leo XIII spoke out strongly against state marriage back in their day, although I admit I don’t know what the current official stance of the Roman Catholic Church is. I think it’s fair to assume they don’t recognize them between two men or two women or more than two anybodies, but I don’t know if the Church as a while would consider my husband and I married or not. According to my mother-in-law, they don’t, but she’s not exactly the most theologically informed source.
I think the word you were looking for is “secular.”
I agree with the others who say it’s not as simple as this. The religious leaders who perform the ceremony do have a legal power from the state. Remember the line “by the power vested in me by the state of [Texas], I now pronounce you man and wife”?
I agree with the OP - let the state perform the civil arrangement, but I say call it “marriage.” Then if people also want a religious ceremony they’re perfectly free to do that, and churches are not obligated to perform their religious marriage ceremony to gays or blacks or whomever they don’t like.
What we have now works, and I see no reason to change it, other than to expand the undrstanding of who may commit to marriage. A couple decides, between themselves, to commit to marriage. They obtain a license from the state, and go before an officiant and witnesses and formalize that commitment with vows. The officiant then declares them married. If they desire a religious wedding in which God’s blessing is invoked on their marriage, they can choose an officiant who is a clergyman, but they are not obliged to do so, nor is a church obliged to unite in marriage a couple that it feels may not be married (divorced Catholics, gay couples). France has spearate civil and religious ceremonies, in that order – an unmarried couple in France may not have a church wedding; they must be legally united by a civil marriage first. It’s an unnecessary complication that is not needed.
Speak for yourself, mrAru and I had a Justice of the Peace and are married. He called it married, as in the whole I pronounce you man and wife, you may kiss the bride. Just because he didnt shake a rattle and sacrifice a chicken doesnt make us civil unioned instead of married.
This is essentially what they do already. Unless you mean to have the religious ceremony “decertified” by the state, and require all marriages to be administered by a judge, with the religious ceremony being mere window dressing. Today, the state deals with the civil arrangement, with the clergy acting as a person certified by the state to perform the marriage, and sign the documents.
Decertify the clergy, and you’ll have a major mess on your hands, it’ll be seen as an attack on religion.
Officially call all marriages a civil union instead of a marriage, and the anti-SSM folks will see this as proof that gays destroyed the institution of marriage.
We have a system of legal marriages that seems to have worked just fine for the past few centuries. While I can find plenty of good reasons for the institution of marriage to be more inclusive I have yet to find a compelling reason to radically change the nuts and bolts of getting married. There’s nothing wrong with allowing members of clergy the legal right to officiate at marriages as there are also secular alternatives.
Odesio
I never can understand what, besides a kind of libertarian idealism, make someone think it would be easier or more acceptable to the general public to take marriage away from everyone except the religious instead of simply letting gay and lesbian couples get married. It may indeed address your particular political viewpoint better, but it doesn’t really help advance anything in any practical manner.
Heck, it’d be fine to call gay marriages “civil unions” if we could trust that some future bureaucrat (who might be a bigot or just exceedingly anal retentive) won’t say something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter if you have a civil union. Regulation 10 paragraph A, sub-section 5, line 8 says ‘only the person who can present a valid marriage certificate can claim…’” and stick to his guns, preparing to take the matter to the Supreme Court if necessary.
If you can have some massive search-and-replace operation that replaces every occurrence of “married”, “marriage” and all variations with “married or witihin a civil union”, “marriage or civil union” or whatever, in every federal, state and municipal book of laws and regulations, I’d say okay, use the “civil union” label. Since you can’t though, I won’t. Seperate but equal ain’t.
Technically speaking, every married atheist couple I know was married by a licensed minister of some kind–two Unitarian ministers (one of whom had a reading from Dr. Seuss, even) and one ULC Mail-Order Minister.
So what you are all saying is, “We should have an institution that affords government recognition to two persons who want to commit exclusively to live together as spouses till the death of one, regardless of what some church or other may think of that commitment”??
We have that already – it’s called marriage – civil marriage. And it does not matter what Jim Dobson or Magellan01 thinks is the ideal for marriage – that’s what the law reads. Allow civil marriages to gay couples, just as civil marriages have been available to rich old men with the hots for nubile starlets who have the hots for the rich old man’s money, infatuated adolescents over tha age of consent, solemn committed conservative Christians, atheists with a moral sense of commitment, Britney Spears and the guy she wants to be married to this week, couples who want an open marriage, Hindu couples wanting a traditional Rajasthani marriage, devout Muslim couples, widows and widowers who have found companionship for their loneliness in each other, etc. This is America, not the Theocratic Republic of Deusdedit, and nobody but the people’s elected representatives and the judges chosen by vote of the people or of their representatives ruling in accord with the federal or state constitution get to say what limits we shall put on marriage.