WHY DO WE HAVE MARRIAGE LICENSES? AND WHAT IS A MARRIAGE FOR THAT MATTER?
(Historically, for the same reason we have title companies for our homes and automobiles, and insurers to protect those assets. Today to destroy our civilization from within?)
TERMINOLOGY
(a) License is just a term that the state can use, but that’s not its purpose. Most of the time, states use the term “Marriage Certificate” which allows third parties to verify the marriage exists and committments by both parties are enforcible.
HISTORICALLY
(a) Marriage was a contract between the sexes on one hand, and public marriage a committment by the people and the polity to insure the marriage by **non interference in the marriage**. Essentially a property right of both parties.
(b) To protect the common good, the church then the government or both enforced the contract between the parties, and between that party and the public. The broadest funciton of the state is ‘insurer of last resort’. Much of what governments do act as an insurer. Regulation is by and large an act of insurance of the people gainst harm.
(c) The state In it’s role as an insurer against harms by others, and with marriage crimes being common in history, including bigamy, undermining a marriage, and divorce, states had an interest in suppressing marriage crimes. So laws regulating divorce and the distribution of assets (usually children and what you brought into the marriage for the woman, and what he accumulated during marriage for the man (if anything).)
(d) Given that families were one’s primary economic and survival insurer, and especially the insurer of the offspring, such that single mothers and abandoned children didn not brecome a hazard to local society, historically speaking **marriage was a union between families not just individuals**.
(e) As such, as populations and mobility increased, notices were published usually in the churches (the “Bans”) to prevent bigamy and to ask the community if there were objections. (We still ask for objections in our traditional wedding vows today.)
(f) In the USA where religion was inconsistent, and cross-religious marriage common, marriage licenses evolved because the state officials could conduct marriage instead of just the church. So in practice – a marriage license is a **record of a contract** that the state can enforce, and prevention of false claims that attempted to make the state enforce.
(g) In the USA, the marriage license was expanded from preventing bigamy and limiting divorce crimes, and next used to prohibit interracial marriages, and later, once awareness of blood type incompatibility and its affect on children, and later to assist in shared credit and state benefits.
THEREFORE
1. Does the state have a role in enforcement of a contract and in defense of the asset of the marriage?
… (Yes, certainly).
2. Does the state have a role in determining how marriage may be used for circumventing law, abridging cultural norms and traditions, or other impositions of costs upon the community given that the family is the first of the formal institutions of any polity?
… (Probably)
3. Does the state have a role in determining if other than a man and a woman can engage in marriage? No historical evidence. No necessity. Same can be accomplished by private contract, including exchange of powers of attorney.
… (Questionably.)
4. Does the state have a role in ending the prohibition on the interference in a marriage; or enacting no fault divorce, forcing common property, or alimony, or child support?
… (Absolutely not)
The Progressive Administrative, Managerial State, in league with the left, and the feminists, have destroyed the institution of marriage, the family as insurer, and the public’s defense of that institution and contract – and with it the first and most necessar instituion of behavioral, social, cultural, economic, and political constructoin.
Just as the left said it would – and did.
So, what is the difference between war against life and physical capital without, versus war against behavioral and institutional capital within?
There isn’t any other than the rate of destruction.
It’s still war.
Cheers
Curt
Reply addressees: @Xeranx @Eliendssss @return_of_rome @schizarella