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Originally Posted by sike
interesting question...when did organized government first stick their nose into marriage? And what was the original purpose in doing so....taxes? enforcing a unified state religion? Any one with info on this?
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i think for the most part, and through much of time, the "official" church and the government were so inextricably linked that it's hard to tell where one was ending and the other beginning....
as for the US, where there is no established church, the primary use of government regulation (as opposed to recognition*) of marriages was initially to impose a bigoted agenda....fighting polygamy (because that was something for asians and africans, not europeans) and preventing "mixed-race" marriages were high on the government's list (homosexual marriages being unimagined, then). i think if you scoured the state laws, you'd find all sorts of "you can't marry a white to a person who is 2/5ths indonesian....marriage licensing was a way of enforcing these laws.
(*....an interesting evolution -- we've moved from state sponsored "certificates", where the state acknowledged that two people were married, to state marriage "licenses", a license being a grant of permission by the state.)
anyhoo...now i'm sure some have some rationales for statement regulation of marriage.....got know who to send the social security benefits to and what not...personally, i think the rationales are generally tortured and hardly justify the loss of freedom.