LOL, I’m only looking for the government not to let each church or mosque impose it’s own definitions of marriage and eliminate age restrictions like you want.
That was a badly phrased sentence that I wrote to you. I meant that you want individual churches to define marriage, not that you want age restrictions removed, although that would be the result if you got your desire of keeping the state out of marriage and letting churches write their own rules for marriage.
You and others make a good point. Primarily, at the onset of this Republic, there were only a handful of Christian denominations. Despite what we might consider today to be relatively youthful ages of marriage, 16, or even younger, there was the overwhelming Christian, monogamous, heterosexual marriage, and really, nothing else was considered.
Since then there have been a number of different religious paradigms invented or dredged out of the Dark Ages or before and presented as some sort of religious redifinition of marriage.
There, however hangs the quandry.
In the event the State, subject to the will of its people, tries to limit marriage to the old Judeo-Christian paradigm, (which is fine with me, even though by readily making marriage and divorce available, the state is the entity which has caused more damage to the institution of marriage than the traditional Christian churches would have), there will be an outcry from splinter religions, the a-theistic, the nonbelievers, and those from the Islamic and other groups who have markedly different practices on first Amendment grounds. I'm surprised the homosexuals haven't pulled that out of their hats yet, even though I personally will not recognize such a union on par with marriage.
If, indeed, the benefit of aa stable home environment to raise children was the object (to raise better citizens for the state), why did the state undermine the institution of marriage by facillitating divorce? Surely, the greater difficulty in ending a marriage would make people more cautious when entering into such an arrangement, and tend to remove frivolity from a choice which would likely be lifelong.
Instead, the state has removed the constraints to provide divorce on demand, which effectively makes the environment for raising children within the traditional family framework less stable.
The answer, of course, is that the Socialists in our Government have been actively attacking the family since the '60s, and in doing so, justifying the encroachment of the State into the familial relations of us all.
Without this, there would have been no 'broken homes', at least not on the scale we know today, and there would have been no need for the massive expansion of Social Services entities which comprise the largest and most expensive of governmental leviathans today, and which continue to cause damage to the traditional concept of family, in direct contradiction to the concept of having stable environments in which to raise children. Such is in their interest, after all.
Instead, the rearing of children (thanks as well to the advent of the two-wage earner family), is increasingly being taken over by the state.
None of these factors is isolated, after all, it was the State which sought to purge God from the schools, which instituted sex education form K through 12, which continues to 'educate' children well past their years for accusing kindergardeners of 'sexual abuse' for hugging another kid who says "Ick!" in response.
I have no problem with the State merely regulating marriage, but the State did not stop there, and with the changes which have come with that, the State further has the ability to define what constitutes a marrige, between whom, and has effectively usurped the power of the Church in doing so.
Keep in mind that (at least in the Christian and Jewish traditions), marriage is defined by scripture, and is relatively immutable, but the State is not so constrained.