Should Clergy Act as State Agents?

It is a pet peeve of mine that the idiom "to beg a question" is so frequently misused. I expected better from a professor visiting at Yale. To beg a question does not mean to demand a question, as he has used it, but rather to empty (to beggar) it of meaning by assuming the answer in the questioning itself.

A common example of the correct usage is to ask Mr. Smith at what time he beat his wife the night before, without having established that fact that she was even beaten, thereby assuming that he actually did so. The real question - whether he beat his wife at all - is beggared. The interrogator has begged the question.

I go through all that trouble because I wish to use the phrase correctly. The Rev. Dr. Balmer, and most of the other commentators I have read on the WaPo blogs to this point, have begged the real question. The real question is whether the STATE ought to be involved in marriage at all, seeing as how until very recent years, it has been seen primarily as a religious affair. It may even be that the gay marriage debate alone has cast it in this new light. A second question follows, or is demanded (but emphatically NOT begged) by this first question. That is, what is the purpose marriage in the first place.

My sense is that those two questions asked and thoroughly contemplated, the question proposed by the WaPo, and the gay marriage question in general, will simply disappear.

Maybe that's why those two questions are not being asked in the public forums controlled by the mass media.

I think the problem here is in *perception.* Recognized clergy have as much right to perform a civilly-binding marriage as anyone *else* who goes through one procedure or another to obtain the credentials.

But they have no more *say* about who is to be married *anywhere* than anyone else does, either.

This should be made clear.

Cause it seems a lot of clergy are attempting to preserve a sense of influence they do not have by denying the equality of others, because it seems the more likely someone is to be a churchgoer, the more likely they are, it seems, to think civil marriage is in religion's bailiwick.

I've had this same opinion for years. In fact, my husband and I did it this way, even though we didn't have to.
We held a religious ritual in our home with no attendant legal paperwork - wrote and conducted the ritual ourselves, acting as our own clergy - and that date is when we celebrate our wedding anniversay.
Later, we went to the Clerk of Court's office, purchased a license, and had a judge sign it and place it on file.

Well said! I couldn't agree more.