Should the government play any role in legislating marriage?
In some sense, this question seems to
assume that churches have been in the marriage business all
along and that the secular state is the latecomer.
But human history and
virtually every human society shows that civil marriage has always
been an interest to all human governments. Furthermore, marriage is
pre-political. The government recognizes traditional marriage as the most basic
molecular structure of society; thus, every government has
historically privileged and protected marriage as the union of a man and a woman. In
order to preserve society and its interests, governments must
honor the marital covenant, promote procreation, and encourage parents in
child rearing.
Now because some politicians have a different view on marriage they seek to impose homosexual marriage and equate it to traditional marriage.
When the first colonies were
established in America, marriage was considered a civil institution. Some
Puritans did not even see marriage as the ceremonial responsibility of
the church. It now appears inevitable that the faithful church will operate
by a more restrictive definition of marriage than the larger culture will
operate. Government, however, can never get out of the business of
marriage or escape the responsibility of defining
marriage,
because government, by its very definition and nature, must determine who is accountable to
whom, to whom children belong, who has the rights to make decisions
on behalf of others, and what should be protected as the zone of intimate
interest for the society itself.
