And if one interprets the question only from this perspective, if one disregards recent legislative outcomes, then this alone is enough to raise reservations about a piece of legislation that intends only now, after 1000 years of silence, to incorporate into particular law a Roman legal prohibition from a distant period whose views on the influence of religion on legal capacity have been long since overridden, and that, according to the monumental character of the present draft, also intends to pass that legacy on to late descendants!” –
The fate of this petition, which was submitted in 1861, is described in Siebenhaar, Kommentar III., p. 28.
The unambiguous prohibition on marriage in accordance with Protestant ecclesiastical law declared [in this petition] was not confirmed by the aforementioned Saxon teachers of ecclesiastical law.
The author of this petition was also fortunate enough to find support for his view in the following legal case from the senior authorities.
[In the legal case concerning the legal status of children from a Jewish-Christian marriage] the Royal Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Public Education decreed on May 9, 1867:
“that the union of the persons named would have to be deemed void both materially and formally, since the regulation contained in § 1617 of the Civil Code only encompassed that which had already been legal in Saxony before the promulgation of this Code and that, as a result, the children produced from this relationship were to be regarded as extramarital.”
Accordingly, the Royal District Administration instructed the Dresden City Council on May 22, 1867, to take official steps against the cohabitation of the persons in question in accordance with § 1621 of the Civil Code.
And, indeed, based on this decree and by means of resolution dated July 12, 1867, the Royal Police Department in Dresden, to which the City Council had to delegate the matter, ordered the woman to leave the accommodation occupied by the man to avoid a fine of 20 groschen* or two days of arrest and then ordered the man under penalty not to permit the woman to live there after that time. In response to the appeal lodged in conjunction with a request for dispensation, which emphasized above all that according to the older legislation relevant in this case such marriages were not prohibited by law in Saxony, on November 8,1867, the Royal Ministry of the Interior repealed the expulsion order, while the Royal Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Public Education issued a dispensation and, by a decree dated July 6, 1868, declared the marriage valid on the following grounds:
* Starting in 1840,1 groschen equaled 10 pfennigs in Saxony – trans.
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