Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College, asks why anyone needs the state’s permission to marry. It’s not an unreasonable question.

For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

She recounts how the marriage license became intertwined with monetary benefits of survivorship in the middle of the last century, and why “the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection.”

In 2004, I argued sort of conversely that it is the church that should get out of the wedding business - let the state worry about validating weddings and let the church worry about nurturing marriages. I still think it’s a good idea, and if you read Prof. Coontz’s essay and mine, you’ll see that they are actually congruent.