Marriage is a religious sacrament. Isn’t there supposed to be a separation of church and state?
To pick up on this Rant from lunch, where it came up:
I believe in the separation of church and state. The state has no business telling the church how to run things, telling Christians how and where they can worship, and legitimizing religious rituals. Likewise, the state doesn’t take orders from any one church. I think every American can agree with these principles; problem is, most people believe “separation of church and state” means how the courts currently misinterpret it: the removal of religion from public places and functions, which violates the spirit of the First Amendment’s clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Technically, it’s not really violated—Congress doesn’t make laws against it; the courts do.
Another way in which the separation of church and state is violated is by the government legitimizing marriages. Marriage is a societal function; but it’s one that comes from religion. For crying out loud, the marriage ceremony is a religious ceremony. It’s considered a sacrament by many churches. Yet we actually have judges and J.P.’s performing marriages, and we don’t think anything of it because we really aren’t thinking about it whatsoever. You wouldn’t have ’em perform a baptism, a briss, communion, or the last rites; what are they doing performing marriages?
Most of the problems with marriage in America are because of state legitimization of marriage. The state will let you get married with no premarital counseling, no waiting period, and no judgment calls; some states don’t even require a blood test. They dissolve marriages in a no-fault manner; everything is simply divided fifty-fifty, with no marital counseling. It’s like a business arrangement; and to the state, that’s all marriage is. And because it’s nothing more than a business arrangment, the state really doesn’t care what gender the partners are either.
The state needs to get its hands out of it, but instead, the Republicans want to define marriage in the Constitution. This is no surprise, since most politicians worship their party rather than God; why else are so many of them available Sunday mornings for the talk shows? They don’t understand the nature of marriage any more than most of us; they certainly don’t respect it, as seen by their past examples; they even tax it, which is why my grandmother and her boyfriend are currently shacking up—why get married when it means they lose pension and Social Security incomes?
As a result, they’ll likely pass their silly amendment, create a Constitutional contradiction that helps nullify the First Amendment, and help future judges erode the Amendment’s protections even further. Bloody Congress.