Marriage

[mamadeb]

Marriage in the USA is a civil matter, not a religious one. For reasons of tradition, we empower religious officicants to enact marriages, but those marriages do not exist legally unless a marriage license is also issued. (Any one with multiple spouses knows this. For that matter, I know of Orthodox Jewish couples who chose not to have marriage licences. They are married halachically, but the state doesn't recognize it.) We also empower secular officials (judges, justices, county clerks) to do the same. There is no set ceremony (the Jewish ceremony does not resemble any Christian ceremony, for example - no vows are made, no kisses are exchanged.)

Because of this, and because no state can possibly require a religion to perform a marriage against its own tenets, I really don't see how any church or set of beliefs should have any bearing on who should or should not get married other than under their own auspices. I've said this before - Judaism, for example, forbids a marriage between a man and his ex-wife's sister (or his wife's sister, for that matter) in his ex-wife's lifetime. (Jacob married his wives before the Torah was given.) No Orthodox rabbi would perform this marriage. However, such a couple is and should be perfectly permitted to marry civilly. No synagogue has lost any tax-exempt status or been fined because of this.

If LDS or Orthodox Judaism or Catholicism or whoever do not want to perform gay marriages, this is their right and their privilege, and it would be wrong to require them to do so. But that has nothing to do with equality before the law. The right and penalities of marriage should be available to all consenting parties - anything else denies the equality of all adult Americans.

Comments

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Gah. Civil ceremonies for all, and get your priest to bless it if you need to. That's what we did and we haven't gone down in flames.

Technically speaking, that's what everyone does. The religious ceremony is civilly meaningless except insofar as it creates the legal bond.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Okay, most of the weddings I've been to have had the license at the site, be it a church or a rented house or whatever, and the officiant signs the license and you drop that off with the county clerk to have it recorded. So, if it's in a church, the minister is the one who is legally signing the document to show that he married the couple.

Basically what I'm saying is that everyone should have to hie themselves to the local JOP and get married there, then hie themselves to the religious institution of their choice to have the marriage blessed, should they so desire. And that's the only way it should be allowed. No one other than a JOP can sign that license. No priests, no ministers, no one who got a piece of paper from the Universal Life Church, no one.

If no religious ceremony is desired, then they're still just as married as the folx who had the priest/minister/rabbi/whoever perform a ceremony.

Granted, I could be totally backwards, but my first marriage in California, Shadowren signed the marriage license and we dropped it off at the county clerk's office. My second marriage, we went to the courthouse, the JP did his thing and we got the marriage blessed in the church a bit over a year later. Like I said, I could be totally backwards. If so, my apolgoies.

[dreamalynn.livejournal.com]

This is what is done throughout most of Europe (and I'd imagine elsewhere), you have to have a secular ceremony, and that is what makes you married, and if you want a religious thing before, after, the next month, the next year, whatever, to make your marriage holy as well as legal, that's up to you.

The fact that religious officials can legally marry people in the U.S. leads to all manner of confusion in people who, essentially, don't understand the law and cannot be bothered to try to understand it out of their own fear, prejudices or basic intolerance for knowledge. The fact that we've been hamstrung by this demographic scares and saddens me, greatly.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

I don't think it matters who signs the license. That it exists at all makes it a civil ceremony. It's certainly not unknown - in Europe,it's normal to get married in a church plus the registry office (and it doesn't really matter what order it happens in, anyway.)

You have to get the marriage license in person anyway - there's no reason to not assume that's the civil ceremony as well. (I assume that by "blessing", you mean the religious ceremony.)

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Yes, by blessing I do mean the religious ceremony. For us, it was a marriage sacrament, but I'm unsure of the correct term for everyone, so I used a generic "blessing." It wasn't meant to offend.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

Nod. I'd go with ceremony, myself. More generic, I think.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. :-)