By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
When a Jewish boy turns 13, he heads to a temple for a deeply meaningful rite of passage, his bar mitzvah. When a Catholic girl reaches about the same age, she stands in front of the local bishop, who touches her forehead with holy oil as she is confirmed into a 2,000-year-old faith tradition. But missing altogether in each of those cases - and in countless others of equal religious importance - is any role at all for government. There is no baptism certificate issued by the local courthouse, and no federal tax benefits attached to the confessional booth, the into-the-water-and-out born-again ceremony or any of the other sacraments that believers hold sacred.
Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned. Two law professors from Pepperdine University issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors - one of who voted for and one against Prop 8, which successfully ended gay marriage in California - say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009031...08599188519000