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http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/british-mp-urges-government-to-force-churches-into-same-sex-unions?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4aa5467bd0-LifeSiteNews_com_Intl_Headlines09_08_2011&utm_medium=email

What is breathtaking is that no British news medium seems to have given this any attention.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

fpb.livejournal.com

ON what grounds do you suggest that Roman marriage (by which I take it you mean marriage in the city of Rome in republican and imperial times) was not a religious institution?

From:

fellmama.livejournal.com

Marriage was most definitely a religious institution in Rome (and the empire as well), but it was equally a wholly secular institution policed by both the state and social, non-religious norms. I'll certainly give you state registration as a recent innovation, but state acknowledgement and definition, hardly.

Or in other words, the religious rite that resulted in marriage in Rome was completely distinct from the legal status of being married.

From:

fpb.livejournal.com

Of course. Rome invented bureaucracy. And used it in the Decian persecution to try and uproot the Church from the face of the earth, using the resources of its census to force every single person in the empire to sacrifice or be executed. But the fact that bureaucracy could be used to support religious goals (such as the extermination of the impious Christians) does not mean that the bureaucracy was itself independent of religion. Quite the opposite. Rome knew no separation of Church and State. The priests were as much state functionaries as the consuls, the Senate had religious duties such as validating new cults, and the Emperor was both Supreme Pontiff and Tribune of the People.

From:

fellmama.livejournal.com

Perhaps you are unaware that I have an MA in Roman history? I mention this not because "ur rong" but so that you may assume a certain basic level of understanding and knowledge on my part.

Anyway, I meant nothing about the separation of church and state, a wholly modern invention indeed. My point was simply that marriage could be and often was not religious in the Roman state, and thus that your characterization of marriage as always and ever religious is flawed.

What I find interesting about this, incidentally, is that a religious aspect to a particular marriage was frequently used as subsequent justification OF the legal status of the union--something today's jurists would find backwards, no?

From:

fpb.livejournal.com

It depends on what you mean by religious. If you read Dumezils' "Marriages Indoeuropeens" you will find that the threefold classification of Roman marriages had a wholly religious base, even though only the highest-ranking one - confarreatio - actually involved priests. The act as such changed the status of an individual in society in a way that reflected on their religious status - for instance, certain sacrifices could only be carried out by young people who were patrimi matrimi, having a set of married and living parents. (That must have caused a good deal of problems in the late Republic, when divorce was virtually universal among the upper classes, and explains why someone could be made flamen Dialis at seventeen, like the young Caesar - a few years more and you would find nobody with the necessary requirements. No, I was not aware that your specialization was in Roman studies, but I was perfectly well aware that you are a fellow historian, and had absolutely no intention to patronize. It's nice to be able to speak to someone who can be assumed to have actual knowledge rather than the frequent and dreadful synthetic assembly of factoids motivated by ill-digested ideology that one has most often to deal with - people who are ignorant but think, because they read the wrong books, that they are educated.