SCOTUS orders thrice-divorced KY county clerk to issue marriage license

[Belsnickel]

(09-10-2015, 02:05 PM)Benton Wrote:

Wow. That's not correct at all. It started in Europe several hundred years ago due to two areas: conflict with the Catholic Church (which had previously sanctioned the bulk marriages) which didn't always recognize marriages it didn't agree with and a need to keep track of citizens going to colonies in the Americas and Africas.

For the US, we had a hodge podge of state laws — yes some preventing interracial marriages — that made marriage laws difficult. Just like gay marriage, you could be married in one state, but not in another because of someone's race, age, etc.

But the biggest reason? Money. States figured out they can charge $X for every married couple and have an already existing office take care of the paperwork.

So, no. It's not about race. It's about money.

Actually, even that is not correct. Civil marriages are very old indeed. In fact, very few marriages during the middle ages in Europe took place in churches, and that was a time frame where the population was arguably much more religious and religion played more of a part in their daily lives than today. Even marriage during Biblical times among the Jews was more of a civil construct than a religious one when you read about it. It just so happens they had a theocracy and so it is more difficult to disentangle them. Marriage was a civil affair in most ancient cultures as well as it dealt with property ownership.

The fact is the same, though, that there is a huge precedent for civil marriage and to claim it is nothing more than a recent invention for control is laughable, to put it mildly.