The definition of marriage in Western culture has gone through massive transformations, with its civic importance and

religious importance constantly at odds as to how we will further understand its relevance in our future. Now it finds itself looking to be redefined again in contemporary society by the United States of America through some of the most intense scrutiny it has ever gone under. Starting as a collective agreement made by immigrants from all walks of life that symbolized the collective vision of those that created it, the United States of America has stood as a beacon of freedom and liberty for all those that seek it. Its creation brought with it differing perspectives of institutions like marriage that had been established by previous governments across the world. Each culture respected its importance to our strength as a species. In our early days as country, as Nancy F. Cott explains, marriage and government were closely bound. Details of how this marriage were practiced widely varied, such as its inclusion of religion, but the institution was agreed upon to be a civic responsibilitya contract agreed upon by two free people within a free nation that they could freely enter into and exit. We find ourselves today struggling with this previous understanding of how we ran this institution, and how we can adapt it to today's needs in order to continue our success as a society. Economic and political pressures push us to consider what changes we might make to our policies to help us create more wealth and prosperity, while breakthroughs in civic rights are challenging us to fully interpret what the Constitution means when it dictates the classic phrase: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Our devotion to marriage has changed as we've applied what we've though these rights mean to American society. Religions have attempted to enforce its necessity throughout history by explaining its holy and sacred nature, seeing its relevance in the health of our society, but tend to obscure its civic purpose with unnecessarily exclusive dogma of who can and cannot take part in the institution of marriage. Its enforcement of its holiness has ranged from acting extremely violent and extremist towards those who broke marriage's contractual obligation, (in some cases, killing the accused as recently as the Bronze Age). Civic decisions influenced by these dogmatic beliefs have played a part in narrowly defining its structure through recent legislature like the DOMA Act, defining its inclusion to unions only between one man and one woman. In excluding individuals within society, we endanger the overall strength of the establishment. We dually need a civic arena to allow such religious duties to continue. Unlike current society, Revolutionary-era society did not see religion and law as opponents but as two sides of the same coin. James Wilson wrote, "Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other. The divine law, as discovered by reason and the moral sense, forms and essential part of both. While many religions have strictly tried to maintain its contractual strength, we have at the same time moved steadily towards dismissing its contractual strength altogether. Massive shifts in policy and societal upheaval during the 1960's of America caused huge changes in divorce laws, causing a massive spike in divorce to occur. Adopting such laws relegated the contractual obligation of marriage to a transient state, and ease in its legal dissolvability became a priority moving into the 1980's, extending into its current form. Kate Bolik brings up current trends in the marriage landscape in her recent article:
For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. Were also marrying lesswith a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 percent of my Gen X cohort was married; among todays Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 percent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.)

Practical reasons, such as reproduction created through a man and a woman, child-rearing, and communal interaction have long since underlined the importance of marriage as a system that promoted our ongoing survival. Our early understanding of this institution may have been influenced by these biological needs, and helped ground marriage's religious legitimacy with corresponding scientific principals. It also directed how our government may have become involved in its enforcing. The societal benefits include decreased poverty, lower sexual activity and pregnancy outside of marriage, lower crime rates, and higher education attained more frequently. Legal benefits within structures like government have given people

incentives to get married, such as securities, rights, and obligations that enable two people to properly care for each other and their family. Structuring of marriage in its early forms attempted to create airtight seals in preventing negative outcomes and promoting positive ones. Due to the removal of its necessity in a civic context, we find the bottom has fallen out. The issues marriage is designed to dissuade are on the rise. As our current setup and understanding of this man and woman marriage fails, we must reconsider how we can maintain a balance between our civic and religious interpretation of marriage so that it continues strongly into the future. All of legal rights which benefit a man and a woman engaging in this institution should directly apply to any other man or woman. As we've opened further rights for the individual in the history of the United States, we have seen massive steps societally in all aspects of who we aretaking serious the promise of our pursuit of happiness when given the chance to do so. How we take care of each other would begin to gain more focus, and further decline would stop as everyone found the support they needed from themselves, others, and the government that governs them. As every individual effects those around them directly or indirectly, these increased rights would immediately see positive changes. Rights help individuals support each other; taken together, they help society. If the basic purpose of marriage as it exists today within the United States is to strengthen both individuals as defined within our legal understanding of marriage, (economically, emotionally, mentally), it seems unwise to limit who these individuals are to one specific interpretation that is influenced through these previous religious definitions, directly dismissing the equality that we state we shall uphold within our founding documents. The idea of commitment that has been upheld by both civic and religious understanding is the cornerstone of the entire concept in the first place---importance so great that we have made it a binding document in both a secular and non-secular contexts. Allowing any who wish to pursue this type of binding commitment would directly correlate with the freedom we have created to enter into it and out of it, and would enforce this commitment. We must allow all (regardless of their characteristics) to be allowed to pursue to this path with the same protection to their freedom as any other person would receive in our country. By establishing the roots of the institution within this common bond we agreed upon in our nations creation, it would allow us to remove any stigma from the idea of marriage that may have been gathered throughout civilization's development and redefine it in a way that compromises with the civic and religious interpretation of marriage. Allowing for details like religious ritual, this new marriage could bring together new and old beliefs and traditions, and successfully bridge our previous understanding into a new, modern one.

Today, we allow other institutions like civic unions to exist to take the place of this official recognizition of these alternative pairings, While very similar in many ways, those engaged in civic unions do not receive the same rights that a man and woman marrying receive. This reasoning is based in older religious interpretations of how marriage must be defined. With this imbalance helping neither party under each institutions current application, we have to look at what is best for everyone in redefining its current relevance. Economic advantages would immediately be evident in that a whole new section of people would be allowed to be consumers of markets they were previous banned from. Other rights of individuals, such as to adopt, would be strengthened, with options for child-rearing gaining further legal defense for any who chose to take part in it. We would expand our society to include all those we stated we would care for upon Ellis Island, and move into a future of acceptance, sustainability, and further clarified understanding of what it means to be human.