To limit the state license to being applicable ONLY to "holy matrimony" grants the state the authority to regulate a religious sacrament. In the US governments are prohibited from doing that by the FIRST Amendment to the US Constitution.

The reason that it is the First Amendment is that the original 13 states were unanimously agreed on the need for that limitation. At least six of the original states included in their ratification documents the condition that their ratification of the original Constitution was contingent on the immediate creation and adoption of an amendment prohibiting the establishment of any official religion and/or of any government regulation of religious belief or practice.

No government authority has ever, in the US, had the power to regulate, impose, restrict, or define any religious rite or observance.

Government agencies have no authority to do ANYTHING other than by CIVIL LAW. No government in the United States has EVER had the authority to "license" any practice of religious doctrine except to the extent that such practices may conflict with CIVIL LAW.

Some potential rituals have been found to be harmful and in violation of CIVIL law. Rituals of human sacrifice, polygamy, and incestuous marriages are codified as violations of CIVIL law in most places in the US. There are persuasive(?) reasons why these prohibited practices cause harm to the community, and why they fall within the authority of CIVIL regulation.

Those who demand that the CIVIL law, via the civil marriage license, must "protect" their rituals fail to see that that "protection" comes at the price of ceding to civil authority the power to REGULATE their rituals and sacraments. They assume that "their" rituals will agree with any future restrictions, but fail to see that other rituals and sacraments might prevail.

Those who assume that only their own sacraments must be enforced are called BIGOTS.

Those who advocate the overthrow of long established Constitutional principles are, if not TRAITORS, at the least guilty of SEDITION.

Those whose unnatural conviction that the private sex that they can only imagine someone might have is justification for depriving those people of the same civil rights enjoyed by the rest of the people are properly and appropriately called PERVERTS.

John