This is how it was in England hundreds of years ago before all this crap-
Marriages were performed ONLY in churches and the records were sent to the civil registrar to be recorded.
Marriage Records
“Marriage entries recorded the date and place of marriage.
Information included the ages of the two parties, their residences, marital status, occupations, fathers, and even their fathers’ occupations. Civil copies of marriage entries are duplicates of original church entries. Thus, since it was the duty of the minister to forward
copies of all of the marriages he performed, the vast majority have been recorded at the civil level, even in the early years of civil registration.
However, always be sure to check the original church record since there are often discrepancies between the civil and ecclesiastical copies of the same record. Clerical errors happen! We blogged about this recently.”
http://www.progenealogists.com/greatbritain/englishcivilregistration.htm
This is America, we have gay churches, Mosques, Satan worshiping clergy, Mormons, Unitarians, clergy means whatever any American wants it to mean.
This is just another way to make polygamy and gay marriage legal.
Ah, but England had (and in theory still has) an established Church.
That was also how it was in the Roman Empire from sometime in the 9th century when the Roman state decided that civil marriages were redundant, onward — before then, a Christian marriage was a Roman civil marriage undertaken with the blessing of the local bishop, followed by reception of the Holy Eucharist at the same Liturgy by the newly civily married couple. There was no Christian marriage ceremony. (Yes, there was still a Roman Empire then, its capital was at Constantinople. Historians since Gibbon have been lying and calling it “the Byazantine Empire” because they want to dispossess the later Christian phase of its Romanitas so they can claim Rome for secularism). This is why the marriage service is the most recently composed of all Orthodox Christian services (unless you count akathists and canons to saints whose glorification was proclaimed since then as “new services”. I don’t, I regard them as additions to small compline or variations on a paraklesis or molieben.)
Of course, all Oklahoma will do with this is to oblige homosexuals to have Unitarian-Universalist or Wiccan ceremonies, and to have the law eventually struck down on behalf of atheists who want a way of marrying without involvement of a clergyman of any sort.
If I’m not mistaken, our forefathers not only left England to have religious freedom, but also fought a bit of a war with the British so we could have our own way of life.