“Government simply understood this and therefore registered marriages, normally peformed by churches”
Exactly. The problem is that Christians are now a minority in this country and the government definition of marriage is evolving into something that Christians don’t recognize or support. The only solution here is to remove government from the equation. Otherwise, gay marriage will become the law of the land and polygamy, etc.. will likely follow.
The government has always had a role in marriage going back many thousands of years and individuals entered marriage on their own until the Council of Trent, and even then, that only controlled the people who fell under the rule of the catholic leadership, it didn’t affect England.
In the colonies the government was defining marriage as early as the 1600s by limiting marriage to certain racial combinations.