A throwaway question
Posted by Jacques Chester on Monday, September 22, 2008
As it was once explained to me, marriage is a religious ceremony. It symbolises the relationship between Jesus and His church; and in each marriage God is the silent third partner.
In Australia a marriage is also legally defined as being between a man and a woman. Am I seeing things, or does this mean that the State has supplanted God as the silent third partner? Or is it another silent partner? I guess modern marriage is a crowded affair.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:34 AM and filed under Gender, Law, Life, Politics - national, Society.
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The sacrament of marriage or whatever your particular sect calls it – mine refers to it as the Brewing of Marriage – might be a religious ceremony, but marriage itself hasn’t always required either the State or paradoxically chromatic unicorns.
Anyway, State involvement in marriage is at least as old as John Calvin.
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 11:04 am | PermalinkI don’t think marriage is simply a religious ceremony. Its a ritual which symbolizes commitment and love between two people. However for the government to step in and say “this is the appropriate marriage” is a religious judgment and certainly not a secular one.
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 11:32 am | PermalinkWhy? Is it because “this is an appropriate marriage” is a moral judgment? It isn’t as if the (secular) State is not already in the business of making moral judgments – legal age of consent, adoptive siblings considered consanguineous, &c. Disagreeing with the particular moral judgments made by the State shouldn’t lead to declaring the State can’t be in the business of making them. That would be dangerous, it would mean abdicating moral authority to religious figures.
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 12:03 pm | PermalinkMarriage is a lottery; a promise made to heaven, the State, et al that we can always retract if things don’t quite work out.
[Prem Rawat ]
The puzzle is everything is subject to constant change; the saving grace is within you there is a constant!
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 1:01 pm | PermalinkAll dogs have four legs,
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 4:18 pm | PermalinkMy cat has four legs,
Therefore my cat is a dog!
I would say that the state has supplemented rather than supplanted the role of God. The church side of things is the spiritual-side, the state just registers the business partnership. Strangely, the state rules that you can only have one such business partner at a time, and that they can’t be of the same gender, but that’s another story. Even more strange, is that they deem other people to be in such a partnership by default, based on their living arrangements – but that is yet another story.
Many do not believe in God, and the legal side will suffice, and so will be married by a celebrant (though I’m sure most still consider it a spiritual act, if not religious)… I suppose the opposite is also true: that is, that it’s possible for a church to perform a ceremony that means you are married “in the eyes of God”, whilst not being a marriage in the legal sense.
Posted on 22-Sep-08 at 6:23 pm | PermalinkThat is a very judeo-Christian-Moslem view of marriage. Go anywhere else in the world – asia, africa, sth pacific and all sorts of basis for marriage can be found. Don’t be so narrow minded about what marriage means and all types of possibilities open up. At its basis marriage is a social event – usually involving wider recognition of a particular relationship than between the two (or more) individuals directly involved, although this does not have to be the case. Two hermits could marry without anyone else being aware of it and with no god or state involvement.
Posted on 23-Sep-08 at 5:43 am | PermalinkI think it’s a good point.
It annoys me when people say “marriage is a union between a man and a woman” – they should specify which man and woman, and what everyone else is supposed to do.
Posted on 23-Sep-08 at 7:50 am | PermalinkMarriage was a religious institution hundreds of years ago. This led to all sorts of violent conflict because various religions didn’t consider marriages from other Churches as legitimate.
Therefore, marriage was taken over by the State to make it a secular institution. This meant it required things like marriage acts to define what marriage is in secular terms.
You can have all the fancy religious ceremonies you like, but if you don’t sign the marriage certificate, you aren’t married.
My argument is simple. Times have moved on, and in a liberal-democratic countries like ours there is no reason for the state to still define what marriage is. The only thing the state should do is restrict marriage to consenting adults who are not siblings or parents and children. Other than those restrictions, the state should have nothing whatsoever to do with determining who can marry.
I agree with the argument put here:
Posted on 23-Sep-08 at 9:52 pm | Permalinkhttp://www.slate.com/id/2440/