What Marriage Is, And What It’s Not
With the Supreme Court taking on two major cases involving marriage equality this week, it might be useful to consider what marriage really is – and what it’s not – in a modern constitutional democracy like ours.
As a threshold matter, marriage in these United States is not a religious institution. It is a creation of the civil law. Period. Just like corporations would not exist in the absence of state laws that provide a legal method by which individuals can create and maintain them, marriages would not exist – not as legally recognizable entities – in the absence of laws that provide a means by which individuals can get married.
Yes, I know that marriage more or less began as a religious institution (although how do we really know how people formalized such relationships before the dawn of recorded history?). But so, too, did government itself. The idea that government should be secular and completely distinct from religious institutions is a fairly modern innovation. Yet, here we are: A country in which there exists, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
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