Father Mark Pilon thinks that the Government — the States — should get out of the marriage business now that the State has rejected any compelling interest in maintaining an institution that SCOTUS has redefined into oblivion. Instead, religious bodies should do the marrying of the couple, who will then register it with the state for tax purposes. Non-religious persons can simply draw up a civil contract, with an agreement to redistribute property should the contract be violated.
He goes on to argue that the Church should dispense the charade of marriage licenses.
While the Church could support such an end to civil marriage after this decision – though it most likely will not – it could easily remove itself from the civil marriage business by refusing to allow its priests any longer to act as agents of the state for purposes of marriage [via “marriage licenses”]. That would be a mild form of active resistance to the government and would also cut off a legal path to the homosexual lobby ever trying to force priests to perform such ceremonies based on the fact that priests are state agents. The Church could allow its members to go through a civil ceremony after the real marriage in the Church, as is done in other countries.
We’ve spoken about the marriage license problem elsewhere:
Long before the monstrosity of “same-sex marriage” came to be, the way was paved by various moral and juridical capitulations in the realm of heterosexual marriage. One of these, believe it or not, is marriage licenses. This is a problem: to get married in the Catholic Church (in most places, including the United States), a civil marriage license is required. In some places, Catholic bishops fought this as a usurpation of authority by the state, for, as Popes Pius VI and Pius IX taught, “matrimony… is not subject to any civil power,” and “cannot therefore be dissolved by any civil law” (Casti Connubii). This is true, these popes note, even of the non-sacramental marriages of unbelievers, as they are part of the “law of nature.”
