Taking Marriage Private

Why do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

Stephanie Coontz

It has been said here that the state has an interest in promoting and, therefore, regulating marriage. That is a common view among so-called conservatives who now want to use the coercive power of the state to prevent homosexuals from marrying. Homosexual marriage is Christian anathema, regardless of how many apostate Episcopalians, Baptists, and Presbyterians try to imagine it otherwise. That being said, Christians who want to use secular law to enforce the bounds of a Christian sacrament are hoisting themselves on their own petards. The destruction of Christianity as an institution in Europe should be sufficient to provide a strong warning against the merger of secular and Christian powers. Indeed, Christians complain regularly of various "wars" on facets of Christianity, yet they seek to give the state even greater ability to interfere when they ask for its intercession.

Prior to the Enlightenment, women and children were chattel. State-sanctioned marriage provided men with certain property rights. Even Christian marriage, taken nearly unaltered from Hebrew marriage and seen from a social stance, made the wife the property of the husband. Modern state-sanctioned marriage simply makes both husband and wife the manager's of the state's property. It grants the state the right to regulate the marriage bed and creates de facto state property of its issue. If the state can, at will, declare the marriage dissolved and the children forfeit, are they not simply possessions of the state entrusted to the married couple as wards?

As well, marriage grants the state intrusive powers to manage and even seize the actual property of the married couple based on no more than bureaucratic evidence of their union.

Professor Coontz, I'm sure, is not arguing for privatization of marriage out of any great ideological libertarian concern. Since she opened the article with the subject of homosexual marriage, I think it safe to say that is her overwhelming social concern. I think this is an indicator of a trend we may see emerge over the next few years. People living so-called "alternative" lifestyles will begin to realize that asking the government to protect them and their interests also grants the government the right to regulate those interests.