MercyBurst's OP in the topic
"Marriage Isn't a Civil right" was well thought out. I don't agree with all of it, but I can respect more of it than one might expect. The rest of the thread went in a different direction than I want to discuss, and without the months* that it took him to polish his OP, MercyBurst's responses are more ragged. So, although this post is, in one sense, a response to MercyBurst's post, I feel it should be a separate thread from what that thread became.
*I know it took him months to polish the OP because it is a re-working of the OP of a similar thread that he started several months ago.
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So, just what is marriage? There are three different major things all called marriage, and a few minor things that are often subsumed into those major things. An individual couple's marriage can include or not include any of the these things. Many of us (myself included) believe that the more of these things that are included, the better for the marriage.
The first major thing that is called a marriage is an agreement. Depending on the culture and the level of commitment between the couple, and between the individuals in the couple and therir families, the agreement might be between the individuals, or between the families. It might be a simple agreement, or a contract, or a sacred covenant. But at heart, it is an ageement. Neither government nor religion are involved in this agreement. It is strictly between the involved couple and perhaps their families.
That is not to say that religion and government cannot support the system. Religion can serve to encourage the couple to live up to the agreement, and government can provide an impartial ear when there are disagreements within the contract. In this, it is doing no more than it does for any other contract. It examines the terms of the contract and decides who has better kept to those terms, and if the partners wish to dissolve the contract, oversees that the dissolution is fair and in accordance to the terms of the contract. Where the contract failed to spell out terms or procedure, the government has precedents that it will assume are in effect. One or both sides may be unhappy with the results of the government's decision, but an objective viewer would agree that the process was as fair as possible.
The second thing that is marriage (and the only minor thing I intend to list separately) is an announcement of the ageement before friends and extended family, and through them, to the public at large. This usually includes a celebration, and often a feast. This is usually subsumed into a ceremony which is a part of the civil and/or religious marriage.
The second major thing which is called marriage is a construct of the government. Governments began by people banding together for self-preservation and self-protection. Government began to ensure that everyon did his part in this group effort. Laws were written to discourage anti-social behavior, and policies enacted to encourage behavior that would benefit the community. Many of these policies involved families and children. In order to efficiently administer policies concerning families, it was necessary to define families.
It was at this point that government became involved in determining which marriages were legitimate for purposes of these family policies. Over the centuries, registering legitimate marriages became more and more standard, and the idea that legitimacy was only based on the necessities of administering the policies (which was probably never clearly expressed) became forgotten. Thus was born the civil marriage: after a couple (with or without their families) have decided they want to marry, they apply for permission to marry from the government, and register their marrige once permission is granted.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in North America and Western Europe, the policies to benefit children and families have exploded exponentially, but so have illegitimate (non-registered) relationships and agreements. The whole system is becoming impossible to administer fairly.
There have been a lot of stop-gap "band-aid" solutions proposed and implemented, but only two proposals have any real hope of long-term benefits. One is to completely dismantle all the family policies and re-write them in terms of individuals and/or caretakers of children without reference to marriage or family. This is basically MercyBurst's proposal. If it can be done, it might be more fair than the second proposal, but I have my doubts that a government which attempted it would survive the transition period. In addition, I believe that the family unit serves a needed function in society, and that we should not, as the saying goes, "toss out the baby with the bathwater."
The second is to recognize the unregistered relationships and to legitimize them, and bring these unorthodox families under the government's policies. There is a lot of support for this solution, but some of the support still wants to make a distinction between these newly legitimized relationships and the traditionally recognized ones. More on that later.
The third major thing that is marriage is a religious rite. It is only natural for religious peoples to call down the blessings of Heaven upon the relationship to help strengthen it. And to do so at the beginning, when the couple first pledge themselves seems fitting. When there is a symbiotic relationship between the religion and the government of a culture, there need not even be a clash as to who has the right to solemnize or legitimize the marriage. Even here in America, with the separation of Church and State in so many other areas, a priest, minister, or rabbi can still sign a marriage license as the official government witness.
The problem with such a close relationship between civil marriage and the religious blessing of marriages is that both entities have reasons for defining certain relationships as legitimate marriages, and others as not. These are not always the same reasons, and if the time ever came when there were a serious disagreement because of those different reasons, it could spell a crisis for one or the other institution. That crisis is upon us.
This brings us back to the point I said I'd get back to. Until now, in America and Western Europe, government has let religion take the lead in defining which relationships are legitimate marriages, but now it finds it necessary to legitimize relationships which religion still feels the need to stigmatize. There is a strong religious backlash against legitimizing them.
A compromise has been proposed that the newly legitimized relationships be treated like civilly recognized marriages, but not be allowed to be defined as marriages. This raises the question "What is the point of the distinction? If the two institutions are to be treated exactly alike, why do you need separate institutions? If there is a purpose for making the distinction, why keep it a secret, unless it is to keep alive the possibility of using the distinction to treat them differently.
No, it is necessary that if there are legitimate governmental reasons for including these newly legitimized relationships in family policies that they be fully legitimized. One way of doing that is to simply declare these relationships to be marriages. Since religious authorities will still be proclaiming them illegitimate, it will be necessary to make explicit the distinctions that have been present since time immemorial, between the marriage contract, civil marriage and religious marriage. But I forsee a second, more bitter resolution.
If religious people refuse to accept those distinctions in the word "marriage," it may become necessary to point out that distinction by a vocabulary change, and call all civil marriages "civil unions." Of course then all the people who were complaing about calling some unions "marriages" will complain about no longer calling any of them "marriages." They will complain that the newly legitimized relationships "killed" marriage, when it was nothing but their own stiff-necked pride which did it.
