Starting this month in Indonesia, if you love it then you gotta put a ring on it and get a card.
Before this month, couples who tied the knot in Indonesia were just given marriage certificates in the form of passport-like books — one green and one red. But the Religious Affairs Ministry is launching marriage cards this month to add to the number of government-issued cards we have already forgotten that we are supposed to have.
After the card’s official launch on Nov. 8, Religious Affairs Minister Lukman Hakim Saifuddin said the cards were designed to be easier to carry around than marriage books, but that married couples will still get both of them.
“We want [the marriage card] to be simple like the KTP (national ID card) or ATM cards, so it can be kept in the pocket or in the wallet,” Lukman told reporters Sunday, as quoted by Kompas.
Lukman said the card will have digital features integrating it to a digital database of marriage couples, making it easier for their marriage status to get verified for administrative purposes.
The Religious Affairs Ministry is targeting to have 1 million marriage cards distributed this year, with newlyweds getting priority.
It’s not exactly clear what unique benefit these cards could bring besides being slightly more convenient to carry than marriage book since Indonesian citizens already have their marriage statuses listed on their E-KTP (digital ID cards), which, ostensibly, is integrated into a digital national database. Also, it’s rare for married couples to actually have to show their marriage books for anything but administrative purposes.
The House of Representatives (DPR) also has questions about the need for new marriage cards, which they fear could create unnecessary database discrepancies between the marriage registry and the already existing civil registry. DPR officials say they will soon question the Religious Affairs Ministry over the matter.
Other politicians have warned that the marriage card project could be a lucrative cash cow for the Religious Affairs Ministry and thus could potentially be abused. The ministry has faced several corruption scandals in the past, the most notable of which was the imprisonment of several of its officials for graft related to a procurement project for the Islamic holy book of Quran in 2011.
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