I think it’s more that marriage by religious officials predated county clerks and marriage licenses. The laws were written to codify actual practices at the time, and even when the requirement of a license was added, the majority of people still think of a church wedding as the real wedding, and the paperwork as just busywork bookkeeping required by the state.
I think it must be to avoid people getting married on a whim. I only know about the marriage license process in two states - in one, you will not receive the license until three days after you have applied. In the other, you receive the license right away but must wait 24 hours for the ceremony - even if the ceremony will be performed by the same office that issued the application.
There are more differences than that, depending on your state. For example, owning real estate as “tenants by the entirety” is restricted to married couples and in at least some states (maybe all) , a widowed spouse is entitled to a certain percentage of the deceased spouse’s estate regardless of what a will says, so that you cannot disinherit your spouse.
To further this point (no one cares) we were married by our niece, who had some internet credential. However, no one checked to see she even had that. Not us, and certainly not the county clerk who took our marriage license.
Department of Marriage Vows?
You don’t even need to sign a license. Signing any sort of legal paperwork, such as filing taxes as married, is enough to make you legally married. And actually, you don’t even need to do that. All you really have to do is to habitually present yourself and your spouse to the community as being married.
I’m no lawyer but that sounds like the textbook definition of a common-law marriage, which isn’t recognized everywhere. I was asking if the ceremony was necessary for a legal, non-common-law marriage.
In the U.S., in fact, it’s only currently legal/recognized in eight states (with several other states recognizing common-law marriages which had been established in the past, but no longer recognizing new ones).
I always suspected that it’s some way of solemnizing or at the very least putting eyes on the process of marriage, for the sake of inheritance and for identifying “legitimate” children.
So until fairly recently, the two-step process of getting a marriage license, and then having someone official conduct the ceremony meant that there was a record of the intent, as well as someone official (an actual known cleric, or a judge/justice-of-the-peace/ship’s captain who would actually affirm that they were indeed married officially.
That way, if there were questions about who was married to who, or whose kids inherited or whatever, there was a very clear legal trail of both license and ceremony that would identify the marriage in ways that aren’t there if there’s no license and no official officiant.
The license exists because people would like to have the power of the state force others (and the state itself, of course) to recognize their marriage.
If you don’t care whether anyone else acknowledges it, you can just say you are married to anyone.
In Colorado no ceremony is necessary for a traditional legal marriage. All that’s needed is signing the license. A couple can do that right in the clerk’s office, and hand it back in.
My wife and I took the license, and made signing it the ceremony. We went someplace meaningful, signed it, and then turned it in the next day. The law wouldn’t have cared if we signed it at the kitchen table.
So you don’t even need a witness? I guess the clerk witnesses you both applying for the marriage license.
The first wedding I ever performed was in a local historic cemetery, on Halloween. The bride and groom arrived in Victorian dress in a hearse. I was in a tuxedo with full vampire make-up. When I signed the license at the end of the ceremony, I needed a flat place to affix my John Hancock, so I used a headstone. A photographer got a pic of me doing that, it was the shot used in a local newspaper.
That’s essentially just a difference in terminology as one is not legally married until the marriage is registered. Of course, the registrar (or whatever the appropriate official’s actual title is) must ensure the parties to the intended marriage are legally permitted to register said marriage.
In the U.S., it depends on the state. Some states require two witnesses, some only require one witness, and some don’t require witnesses at all.
Part-time officiant here. In California, nearly anyone can solemnise the marriage but that person must understand what must take place before the marriage is official. So, in CA at least, a drunk friend may miss some of these finer points and thus the marriage wouldn’t be valid…but they could technically marry anyone (via what’s called a “deputisation” process) .
(One more thing: i recall that in some places back east, ordination requires one to have a place to worship and a congregation, so ULC ordination is not so simple.)
I think that’s why the rule has remained.
But many states (including CA?) allow anyone to be deputized for a day to perform a wedding. The officiant needs to fill out some paperwork promising to follow the rules (which are on the paperwork) and gets a license to do the wedding. So it’s not as if there’s a strong restriction on who can marry a couple, even in many states that require an officiant.
You win this thread.
The answer to this and most other social questions is the same: the United States is a soft theocracy. Religion is allowed special privileges. Children are not considered “legitimate” unless the parents are married, and that’s solely a religious belief. Not until fairly recent times were the legal prohibitions of illegitimate children inheriting their parents’ estates removed.
Because America is only a soft theocracy, not a hard one, religions have incentive to treat one another as equals in the eyes of the law. Christian morality certainly dominates and gets written into laws, but the IRS treats religions equally and so do most states, which allow equal access to officiate at marriages to virtually all claimers. What’s perhaps especially odd to an outside observer is that states allow a huge variety of secular officials - governors, mayors, legislators, judges, city clerks, justices of the peace - to officiate as well. Why? If it’s to symbolize the power of the state, why can retired mayors and judges still do so?
American marriage laws make no sense. They are expected to preserve morality except when morality is ignored to smooth over legal issues of responsibility, ownership, and inheritance. The modern fights over domestic partnerships and gay marriage show how thoroughly mixed the two somewhat contradictory goals have become.
This gets us back to the OP questions. The several states designate certain categories of officials authorized to, well, officialize certain civil proceedings, and that includes the case of marriages, involving a varying set of individuals per each state’s law (*). The question goes to the apparent disparity in that the civil officials are usually well-specified while in the case of clergy it’s usually pretty damn loose.
(* Of course, these are not universally uniform. For instance, back where I grew up it was only judges who could officiate civil weddings. Not elected officials of the executive or legislative. I suppose the idea was that the same rank of official should preside over both starting and ending marriages? After 2016 the faculty for officiating marriage was extended to Civil Notaries as well.)
However as has been pointed out, there are places like California where nearly anyone who is willing and able to say they understand the rules involved can be provisionally deputized to carry it out. So it seems there may be a trend to loosen up? I should hope so.
There are countries where if you want your marriage solemnized religiously, that’s all fine and dandy, but you still have to go before a Clerk or Notary to officialize it in the civil realm, or there will be no legal recognition never mind if Pope Francis himself officiated. However, in the USA we have to deal with that a whole damn lot of our population would react really, really, really badly to that. A huge number of the constituents believe in full earnestness that the “real” marriage is the church marriage and what do you mean I have to do this twice? So the civil authorities yield on it by making it so ordained clergy can do the honors and fill the blanks in the license form. Although that only reinforces the constituents’ misconception.
Their jurisdictions decided that one of the perks of having held that office is that you get to keep the recognition as approved wedding officiant. Call it a sort of pension benefit (note, that since the retirees no longer are incumbent officials, then they can accept gratuities for it!)