Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs:
It was actually the Religious Zionists who were responsible for creating the undemocratic situation in which Israel is perhaps the only country in the world in which Jews are not free to be married by the rabbi of their choice. I would like someone to show me where, in the entire history of halakhic literature, it is stated that people who are not observant must be forced, or even encouraged, to have a halakhic marriage. The current situation means that when secular Israelis leave Israel and then get divorced, being that they are secular most will simply get a secular divorce. Thus, any future marriage will be halakhically adulterous and the children will be mamzerim. Outside of Israel this is almost never an issue since non-Orthodox people generally don’t get married by Orthodox rabbis, which means that in the event of a divorce we can assume that the first marriage was not halakhically binding. But in Israel, where everyone gets married halakhically, it opens the doors to mamzerut on a massive scale. This was actually recognized by R. Eliyahu Bakshi Doron when he was chief rabbi. He created a big controversy when he revealed that it is a practice among some rabbis that when they perform weddings for the non-religious, they make sure that the marriage is not halakhically binding, precisely in order to prevent future mamzerut. Just this week R. Yaakov Yosef publicly advocated this position.
