“government really isn’t in the marriage business any more than it is in the real estate business when it registers property deeds.”
And that’s precisely the problem. Marriage is a religious practice and yet you think it’s no different than a property deed. The LGBT community agrees with you!
No, I think of marriage as a sacred institution. I believe that no fault divorce laws have done tremendous damage to our nation. Of course, if Christians actually held their marriage vows to be as sacred as they are, we wouldn’t have no fault divorce or it wouldn’t matter much.
My point is that government has really never heavily regulated marriage. The union of one man and one woman, as instituted by God, was correctly viewed both by religious people and secular people as the foundation of the family and of society and therefore worthy of legal recognition. The also realized that it made sense to treat the two people as a single unit for many purposes.
Government simply understood this and therefore registered marriages, normally peformed by churches, and gave the married couple appropriate treatment under the law. It also took on the role of handling divorces.
I believe that Bible believing churches should begin to require any couple wishing to marry in their churches to sign an iron clad, pre-nuptial agreement, based upon the Biblical view of marriage. For example, anyone divorcing their spouse for reasons other than adultery or abandonment would get nothing.
Those who marry outside of such an agreement should be considered fornicators.
>>Marriage is a religious practice
It is also a Socio-Biological practice.
Cultures who declare God dead, themselves gods, and worship human craftsmanship in defiance of the 1st commandment historically tend to suffer natural consequences leading to their own self-destruction:
“Because of this, God gave them over...”
—Romans 1