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

[Benton]

(09-10-2015, 05:38 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: 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.

I think that's probably where we'd disagree. Marriages, typically, were agreements between families. How they were recognized, the traditions, varied by culture. But unless there was a dispute, the government did not get involved much until the 16-1700s depending on country.

Before that, you've got laws in some of the major civilizations, like Rome, typically aimed at regulating the contract part of it, or promoting population controls. But there wasn't the regulation of things like we have today.