its not making gay marriage different. Its making straight marriage different.
Its making it so the government separates itself from the term marriage which the religious zealots use and defend to death, and calling it something different.
Because gay people in the states care about the government side of marriage not the church bullshit(most of them)
So government changes marriage to civil union defines civil union as basically the same thing as married in their books but defines it as between two consenting adults instead of a man and a woman
This. It all depends on how you frame the discussion. My thought is to frame the argument in a way that removes religious objections to gay marriage, and at the same time disentangles a little piece of religion from government. If Christians want to define marriage as a religious sacrament that exists solely between a man and a woman, I say, fine -- if religion gets to define marriage, then any individual church has the right to decide who they will marry. If some churches will only accept men & women, I've got no problem with that; it's their right to decide how they will serve the community. However, there are likely to be some churches that will accept a union of two men or two women, and homophobic groups will have no say in the matter.
And if marriage is strictly a religious sacrament, then the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating it in the first place. Hence why I argue to "give" marriage back to religion. There's still a necessity for recognizing a formal legal relationship between two people, which is why I say to replace "marriage" with "civil union" in all legal language. And with religious objections dealt with, government can define civil unions in any fashion the public chooses, making it possible to recognize the legal union of homosexual as well as heterosexual couples.
To put it another way, if Christians want to argue semantics, then it's rather easy to play word games and give them want they want while simultaneously addressing the civil rights of homosexuals. Christians opposing what I and others are suggesting would have to do so purely on the basis of morality, which is an argument that can't be won, since it's not based in rational thought. The only other objection I can see people making to this idea is the removal of "marriage" as a legal status, since doing so does fly in the face of tradition, and for some reason many people are stuck on the idea that tradition is somehow automatically better than doing something different. Again, it's not a rational argument but it is a powerful motivator nonetheless.
My interest in the subject in question is from the perspective of solving a problem -- of all of the issues plaguing the world in general and the U.S. in particular, this one seems like a no-brainer to me.
