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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

I know nothing about the legal system in Japan, so I am asking: why several courts rule independently on the same matter? Is there a supreme court that decides or not? What are the next steps?

And the other question is: what is a marriage in legal terms in Japan? In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church; then the states stole the term to use it for a civil contract, officiated by civil servants (usually the mayor) with laws and courts managing it. For Japan, which one is in the courts?

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> In Europe marriage was originally a religious thing, officiated by priests and managed by the church

Previously, not originally. In ancient Greece it was a state matter: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Greece>

Legal marriage in Japan is purely civil, administered by the municipality. Religious marriage ceremonies have purely religious effects (which is surely what you'd expect; legal processes are run by the legal system, religious processes are run by the religious system, render unto Cesar and all that).

In my country legal and religious marriage are strongly related: you cannot get married in the church until you get married in front of the mayor. So it is not that obvious as you suggest it is.

You wrote, "then the states stole the term" as though religions own the idea. Religions shouldn't dictate law, and where they don't, whether you can get married in a church means nothing.

That's how it should be, unless you're cool with the idea of the possibility of some other religion becoming the law in your land.

I don't care about religion, but if the church invented the notion of marriage a thousand year ago why not let them use it and for state affairs use a distinct term? I would not consider the religion to be any sort of law in the land, just have a copyright on the "marriage" as a wine maker can have (ex: DOC). People who believe in a religion can have their marriage, people that don't practice a religion can have something called differently because it is differently. Religious marriage in my country has zero legal implications, it is just a ceremony in the church.

> if the church invented the notion of marriage a thousand year ago

Well, first the notion of marriage is a tad older than a thousand years, to claim it's only that old is remarkably ahistorical. Second, which church? Many religious and non-religious institutions have had some notion of marriage for quite a while. Which one gets to claim first rights and to have the proper definition and why do they get to keep making that distinction today for people who aren't members of their church/religion?

> if the church invented the notion of marriage

It didn't. Specially not the Christian church. The Christian bible was the basis for the christian religion. It was written before the religion existed. And it already mentions married people.

We have evidence of marriage going back to the 2300's BC. And it probably existed before that, we just didn't find the evidence yet.

Nah, we have very few writing from the Celts, but they did practice marriage and divorce (the woman took back her parents' bride price, and could divorce if her husband talked about their sex life. The husband could divorce if his wife insulted his beard). The also had concubinage contracts, probably with at least one-to-many, maybe many-to-many.

It was purely legal/civil matter, because religious matters weren't written down. So marriage was in fact not religious originally.

I've gotten that from Peter Berresford Ellis' books, which contains much more than that, and paint Celts as a more refined society than the greco-roman one.

It's worth noting that it's still a religious thing as well. It's just that if you want to claim the governmental benefits that accrue to people the state considers married, well, you'll need the state to say you're married.

And unless you live in a world where words can be owned by an entity, nobody "stole" anything. Many marriages still get both the official paper (civil contract) and the sacrament. They mean a similar thing, and humans being humans means they use the same word.

(It's also not "usually the mayor", btw - that depends on the country. In Germany it's e.g usually the "Standesbeamte". A government official that does the job of a registrar. Mayors can only do the job if they've also been appointed to that role)

The Christian idea of marriage is a further evolution of ancient Roman laws and customs. Roman marriage was fundamentally a civil contract between families. Like any contract, it could be severed. Either by the people in question or by the heads of their families. Early Christians took the Roman idea of monogamy and added a new idea that marriage is sacred and unbreakable.

What a weird way to look at it. States “stole” the term “marriage”? Sorry, that’s not how any of it ever worked.

It's maybe oddly phrased, but in much of Europe, the state did assume power over marriage from the church at some point. Sometimes very dramatically, such as during the French Revolution, when priests were banned from marrying people in the traditional manner and people were compelled to register their marriages with the government. I can see why one might describe that as stealing marriage from the church; or if not stealing, then perhaps expropriation.

Until 100 years ago there was no civil marriage in my country and no civil laws regarding marriage, it was just some penal law punishing polygamy. Then the state took ownership of the notion of marriage by regulating it by law and forbidding churches to perform marriage ceremonies unless you get married by the state, so the religious marriage is just a ceremony with no legal implications these days.

So yes, the state stole the term. It's like tomorrow the state decides by law that everything that color red will be called color blue, that would be stealing the word "blue" and use it to define the color of red things. It is not a natural evolution of language.

> So yes, the state stole the term

But if you keep going back, you get to a time before the church controlled marriages in Europe.

Generally, marriage is a cultural thing, and it tends to be religious at any point in time to the extent the culture is religious at that time.

Yes, there was a time then marriage exist before religion, but it was not regulated by the state. The evolution would be unregulated->church->state. I think the unregulated and church ones are very close in term of legal implications (almost none), while the state is severely intervening and basically destroyed it in recent years.

The concept of marriage existed long before churches as a social contract.

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