But, it's not fair to ask gay people to wait around until marriage is removed from our entire legal system (taxes, immigration, property rights, family law, custody...). So in the mean time marriage equality is a much easier fix.

Maybe someday there will be a ruling based on the Equal Protections Clause that bans treating married people differently than unmarried people under the law. Wouldn't that be interesting?

I'm straight (and divorced), and we got married for many of the same reasons that LGBT folks want to--it makes sense. Visitation rights, inheritance, tax treatment, etc.

It's unlikely that marriage would be removed as something of concern to lawmakers--has that kind of thing ever happened anywhere, any time, any way?

I respect OP's opinion, but it's ivory tower and we're talking about real people right now.

possibly unnecessary edit: just want to reiterate that I think OP is _right_, it's just not practical, and I'll sacrifice rightness for a rather-large "quick and dirty win".

Later, France created a very powerful form of non-marriage civil union (the PACS) and saw it become incredibly popular with straight couples.

The described scenario in France means that you can have a religious marriage if you so wish; an official contract-signing 'event' out of necessity.

Makes sense IMO - not a government's job to tell a church who is or isn't allowed to marry under their religion.

    since some sort of legal status is required for many
    purposes in most countries

I have no need to redefine people's religion if they willingly separate it from the state.

There are actually "religious" organizations who for a small fee will give you a certificate to act as a minister to perform a weddings, no dogma required. I believe these are accepted in all states.

In my state of Colorado, a couple can marry themselves without the need for any official from the state or religion. Couples marrying themselves are free to ask a friend to stand in as an informal "official" during a ceremony, but legally, they sign the marriage certificate as having married themselves.

In the US the question of gay marriage is really about the government recognizing the it and giving gays and lesbians the legal rights and responsibilities found in marriage. Most church's will continue to be against it and not perform such ceremonies. Although a few, such as my own Unitarian Universalist have been advocating for gay marriage for decades.

From what you are describing, in EU you HAVE to be married by a government official even if you are religious. That's the wrong attitude to take. To each their own, let the people choose.

From bureaucratic perspective the important part is that the state is aware of the "social contract" two people made between each other and there is a witness who witnessed the "execution" of that contract. That's all. Who that witness is, as long as they are trustworthy, shouldn't matter.

In a religious ceremony you're married in the eyes of your god, and states don't have to recognize it.

They serve a different purpose, and it makes no sense for a social contract in one community to carry weight in the other.

Not really. Most folks I know, even the ones who got married in a church, were technically already married when they signed their marriage certificate at city hall.

I won't claim to be a marriage expert, but I don't think things are all that different from the Netherlands.

I guess there are actual annulments, but I always thought of those from a religious perspective, not a legal one. I can't fathom that the requirements are the same as presumably the religious one stipulates no intercourss.

However, your point still stands true in the case of custody rights, since same-sex-marriage opponents tend to claim (rather dubiously) that children raised in such a family tend to experience psychological trauma.

I'm really more-or-less neutral on the matter; it doesn't matter what it's called so long as the rights are equal for everyone. "Marriage" is a good-enough term for that.

Some folks express that, yeah. I do not believe it is an honest position in the general case and have suspected since the jump that that's a move of the goalposts designed to appear more reasonable than they are, ready to be dragged back further as they are approached.

Because its not coded language designed to appeal to homophobes, unlike actual Republican rhetoric. If it wasn't an "attack on marriage" it would be something else.

- my inheritance: my spouse can get my SS income when I die, my wife inherits my goods by default, etc. Now gays get the same treatment.

- taxes: are different for married and non-married folks. Now gays get the same treatment.

IOW "follow the money".

This ruling will change how much money the government pays to its citizens and how money is passed among its citizens (after marriage and death in particular). But nobody ever discussed the ramifications of this and the entire discussion was based around a bunch of bombast.

So we're not simply "changing the name".

Actually now ANY TWO people can get the same treatment. Two straight males can get married. If I was single and I had a friend with good benefits, I'd make a case to get married... The savings on insurance and taxes we'd share. Now if millions did this, the cost of those benefits will go up drastically.

Get married to a platonic roommate with a prenup. Risky some what, but with prenups and no fault divorce the risk is greatly diminished.

The access to finding another human to join incomes and assets for tax planning purposes has doubled.

It doesn't help you if the other party doesn't get any of your stuff in a divorce if you're still saddled with debts they took on while you were married.

There may be places where this is possible, but I doubt it'd be worth it once you factor in the cost of sufficiently safeguarding yourself, unless there are massive amounts of money involved.

That said, I do object to the oft-stated remark that marriage has historically been a civil rather than religious institution, primarily because historically that's been a distinction without a difference. Such remarks tend to take a separation of church and state for granted when, in reality, both those things were very frequently conflated until maybe the last few centuries, and even then it was a very gradual shift in practice.

Hell, church and state are still one and the same in much of the modern world (see also: significant portions of the Middle East, the United Kingdom, various others). Implying that this was any less prevalent historically is, well, silly.

Addendum: If this weren't the case, nobody would bother with propaganda or marketing.

This reminds me of the Tea Party slogan "No Taxation Without Representation!", the chanters seeming to have forgotten that they have representation. An elected official who represents them. Just because the chanter wasn't in the voting bloc that won doesn't mean that democratic process wasn't followed...

More so, by expanding the institution of marriage to gays (as it was not long ago expanded to interracial couples) it will ultimately help build public support for redefining marriage.

(undermine in the sense of reverse a principle upon which the arguments used by SCOTUS to defend various decisions depend.)

How many Human-to-human systems out there have invariants coded in for gender/sex settings? It might make for some interesting scenes of discriminatory software in court for businesses that utilize them.

That's nonsense. I'd stay married to my wife even if it were illegal.

For example: different taxation, different financial aid, etc.

You could get rid of all these, but that is a big change.

I don't think that's the full story. I suspect that religious marriage existed long before nation states and most of the current legal distinctions associated with marriage.

I suspect that marriage - a man/wife pairing (or 1-to-N grouping) recognized by the tribe/village with respect to all those legal distinctions related to property, children, etc... - existed long before the religion.

Do you have any actual evidence? Because here in reality-land, the evidence shows that the English legal tradition considered marriage a civil institution long before the churches tried to claim it.

Hardly the place to look for the origin of ancient traditions...

Wat.

The simple fact is marriage easily predates all the English (pre or not) legal traditions. English (pre or not) traditions at best drew on the earlier concepts and practice of marriage.

Crack a world history book open sometime. Or just use google.

For example: http://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Pleasures-Sexual-Amazonian-Peo...

And historically in the West, marriage as a sacrement didn't get off the ground until the late Middle Ages: the Council of Verona in 1184 if memory serves. And even long after that it was still mostly a practical matter for most people.

As to the legal situation many have mentioned, that could have easily been covered by a will for us. It may vary by country, but a will and defacto status offer the same protection in some parts of the world. I sought legal advice when I considered my options of marriage because marriage means little to me. I think its significance to a couple's commitment is highly over rated.

Sure. And that was not in the cards. What you want is not on the table and likely never will be. But expanding the rights of people because of basic fairness is a step in the process of making the lives of our fellow Americans better.

Asking gay people to wait for a unicorn is bullshit. Please don't be That Guy. Ideological purity is so often the enemy of making the world better.

But, why not?

I'm a male. And I'm bisexual and polyamorus. I understand, and accept if a family wants to have 3 adults. Or 4 adults. I'm even OK if children are raised in that atmosphere.

Right now, there are rules and restrictions on polygamy (which is a subset of polyamory) mainly created for the Mormons in the 18 and early 1900s.

Doing as the GP said would have these archaic rules also overturned.

Because gays not being able to marry is an injustice, an unfairness, oppression, etc. Priority #1 is to stop doing harm to those people however it can be implemented. We didn't* say "Oh black people should have rights, but let's postpone that until we can come up with the best possible way to write it in legislature"

*racist people did in fact use that argument

Yes we did. Black people were legally discriminated against for almost 100 years until the Civil Rights Act. And before that, we were slaves until the 14th Amendment. Similarly, women weren't allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment.

I'm all for civil disobedience in the face of injustice. And I'm 100% for gay rights. And I'm ecstatic about the court's decision today. I think it was undeniably right from a moral perspective. But it was probably wrong from a legal perspective, and that's worrisome.

But at the expense of meaning that some couples wouldn't be able to marry, for, what - the next decade? Fifty years? And it's not as if a broader change to the meaning of marriage is off of the cards as a result of this - let's take the wins as they come.

I'm personally not poly in any way, but it's a fun thought experiment about how one could make it work in the current legal climate.

They have no SS? Absurd, why not?

Corporations can't issue medical directives for an incapacitated person.

Corporate shareholders don't get hospital visitation rights or medical insurance via someone's job, et c.

But it's an expensive option given all the paperwork (and taxes) you'd have to file at least once a year.

In the UK, you'd probably be better off incorporating as a trust - perhaps even a charitable trust, if you can find a good enough cover story.

And you may think you're joking, but a lot of families set up financial trusts for their assets for exactly these reasons.

It would be unusual for a trust to include non-married partners, but I don't see why it would be impossible.

I could see how a trust would be better, though, in the US at least, I think a corp / LLC might be more flexible. And here, especially if the corp is formed in a few rules state like Nevada or Delaware, the paperwork isn't too terrible for small organizations.

Just assemble a cross-linked family. Write powers of attorney, medical directives, wills, and so on.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/up-for-pol...

One part that might be different is the special rules for child custody, but there are extramarital legal arrangements for that too.

Do you think that it serves the interests of the rest of society to offer special benefits and protections to 3-4 person unions? If so, what? Is there a size limit on such unions? And under what conditions do they begin/end? If one person leaves the union, is the entire union abolished? What if two leave together? Can you have a divorce that turns one union into two or more? What happens with property and/or child custody in that case?

I have a suspicion that in the end, it will turn out to be best not to make any special legal provision for poly marriages. The law will recognize couples, and those couples will be free, as indeed they are today, to make whatever informal arrangements with other parties they wish. In a few areas -- hospital visitation rights are a good example -- I think it would work to detach the right from legal marriage altogether, and just let people declare who may visit them, etc. But the legal system has to know who is legally responsible for each child, and I don't think it can be more than two people -- even two is often problematic, as we know from long experience.

Joking aside, you'll notice a lot of parallels between a business partnership structure and marriages in general. Including the liability parts!

"Personal liability is a major concern if you use a general partnership to structure your business. Like sole proprietors, general partners are personally liable for the partnership's obligations and debts. Each general partner can act on behalf of the partnership, take out loans and make decisions that will affect and be binding on all the partners"

I'm with you here. But expecting same-sex couples to suffer for poly folks is not copacetic. The cat's out of the bag, and the line will continue to move. And that's a good thing.

> Doing as the GP said would have these archaic rules also overturned.

Doing as the GGP said would have nothing be done, in hopes that something was eventually done. Politics is the art of the possible. Don't pass up victories that are on the table.

I'm not saying the second question isn't important, I'm just saying that it's a little unfair to make people wait while we already have a law about pairings in place while we have an unrelated conversation.

It's not a majority vote under monogamy, by the way, so why would it be under polygamy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of...

How do you figure? Nothing is objectively on or off the table. Nothing is on the table until people make it on the table.

I wrote a long post about it a while back: https://tommorris.org/posts/2555

Not at all. There are lots of legal realities now that have nothing to do with the current marriage-specific laws, and likewise marriage could exist as a legal reality without the current marriage-specific laws.

Which is basically the same thing as having a set of marriage laws without the ceremony and the cake. Pointless refactoring for the sake of it.

Not for most things. You just make a contract with someone, and the government can (if necessary, through the courts) enforce that contract. That works fine for hospital visitation and medical decision making (the government can step in if a hospital refuses to respect a contract) and wills. For things like tax exceptions, well, that's all the government's doing anyway. How about just give everyone the tax benefit if it's really so complicated to figure out.

Before most popular religions were created, marriage was already old.

For cultural reasons, it's popular to do a RELIGIOUS CEREMONY along the marriage. What's religious there is the ceremony, not the marriage.

You can have religious ceremonies without marriage, and marriages without the religious ceremony. Two independent concepts that, by happenstance, often come together.

If you believe that marriage has an important legal function, it's also not fair to preclude polygamists from getting those same legal utilities.

A much better generalized solution is to expand the purview of contract law to allow it to do everything marriage does.

The government does recognize a legal "coming of age" in several cases (at least in the U.S.).

- Driving a car (restricted at 15 years and some months, open at 16)

- Entering the Majority (18)

- Can enter the military (18, or 17 with some restrictions)

- Can have Sex (rules vary by state, but is generally 16-18 with various limits)

- Can drink (21)

etc.

It just so happens that these legal coming-of-age points don't specifically align with any religious coming-of-age. The two are divested from each other due to various pre-existing cultural forces. But it's completely conceivable in some alternate universe that the two are conflated and one enters the majority legally at the same time as going through a "traditional" Sacrament of Confirmation.

Taking the long view, conservatives (and others) should be rejoicing. This ruling is a broad expansion of the definition of what the government will recognize as a family, a definition that is of consequence to numerous helpful social programs, and an affirmation of what family is in civil society. The ruling will have enormous social benefits for our society.

Doesn't make a lot of sense for us to subsidize people to do something which they are supposedly doing because they want to. The only reason there are all these fancy tax breaks is because politicians get ahead saying they are "for families".

It isn't the government's job to "acknowledge" every religious custom you have at church by also writing it into law or something. The government has its own jobs.

Sure it does. Long-term couples tend to take care of each other's health and wellbeing. Marriage is a way of recognising that long-term care relationship.

In countries with any kind of government funded or subsidised health system (or even a private health system based on insurance), those benefits of being married are costs that would otherwise be borne by the rest of society.

When I'm old, having a partner to look after me means I'm less likely to need to go to hospital or need doctor's visits. I'm less likely to be unhappy, so more likely to be economically productive. If I need to take time off work, or retrain, or whatever, two partners are able to rely on each other for both financial and moral support.

Social conservatives are right in the sense that marriage is for plenty of people a form of social "glue" that holds people together. The state has good reason to want people to be held together like that - because it makes citizens happier, more productive, less likely to need public handouts, more likely to be able to raise children successfully or produce taxable wealth - and so on and so on.

It'd be difficult to measure the economic benefit of marriage to the state, but the actual economic benefit of being married is pretty minimal (estate/inheritance taxes seem like the biggest benefit) compared to the benefit to society and to the state.

Most if not all of those things that marriage does are also applicable to same-sex couples, incidentally.

Citation needed. Plus, the benefits have to outweigh the costs: tax breaks, unhappy folks (would that cause health issues?) stuck in the bad marriages etc.

I am guessing availability for comparatively stable social unit for raising kids might be a large enough positive, but the benefits should then be for families who raise kids, potentially scaled with the number of kids (don't know if that's already the case). Even the other benefits you mentioned, have nothing to do with marriage - civil unions (or even group of not-romantically-involved-with-each-other friends) can make citizens happier, productive, less likely to need handouts, raise children well (if single parents can, why not multiple parents?) and produce taxable wealth.

If you don't care about any of that and love another person, place, thing, or idea, you can just announce you're married to him/her/it without recognition from the government and just sort of be together.

Isn't your body your body as opposed to requesting the government permission to marry?

I understand that it's required for recognition, but isn't it time we at least imply marriage is just a matter of recording instead of a formal permitting process?

Because you cannot be married to two different people at the same time. Marriage is not an event that happens, it's a legal contract that cannot be in conflict with an existing legal contract. A new marriage does not immediately nullify the existing contract, so an application must be processed to verify this.

There are also other things that need to be verified like age.

Since we have denied same-sex marriage on religious or moral grounds, are we saying we should deny the right for a man to marry multiple men or women or a woman to marry multiple men or women because of our beliefs? Isn't that the same reason that we're denying same-sex marriage(s)?

Age verification is OK, since minors aren't recognized to be capable of forming contracts.

[1] Jacob was married to multiple wives.

If this view is outdated, and our laws against polygamy are causing people real pain, then by all means let them make their case; perhaps times have changed. But we do not make laws in the abstract, and polygamy in the USA is intimately connected to subjugation, abuse, FLDS, and other ugliness.

> A marriage should be recognized in the same manner that we issue a birth certificate

In the case of a birth there is a clear indisputable fact: a child is born, therefore a new human being that must be taken care of and have rights as a citizen is added to the world.

That's a pretty clear event to which a birth certificate can be attached. Is there such an equivalent for marriage?

Is walking into the courthouse hand-in-hand stating "We're married now; could you record that fact?" not such an equivalent?

Edit: I would like to know why you might disagree if you are down voting me. yellowapple and I have similar sentiments, I think.

Why just two? Why people?

And what exactly is the reason for the State to recognise that two folks like to bump uglies? At lease in the case of traditional marriage, there's the creation of children to contend with.

Huh? Sterile people have always been permitted to marry. Always. Everywhere. Under all circumstances. Ever. Sometimes inability to bear children has been grounds for divorce or--in the case of royalty--annulment, but there has never anywhere been a test for non-sterility prior to marriage. So what does "the creation of children" have to do with "traditional marriage", given "traditional marriage" could and did trivially take place between sterile individuals.

And whose tradition? One man, one woman, the man's concubines, the odd houseslave, and perhaps a sheep or two? Is that the traditional marriage you're talking about? It's by far the most common kind over most of the world before industrial capitalism.

"Why just two people?" is of course trivially easily answered: humans are a socially pair-bonded species. This seems to be basic to our biology, and is the case in every society ever observed. While bonds between more individuals are possible, they are rare and complicated (the modern poly community is small, for example, and most frequently consists of multi-pair-bonded networks).

Not just royalty. An annulment means that there was never a marriage…because a marriage which cannot produce children wasn't regarded as a marriage (or as less of one), which suffices to demonstrate a strong connexion between childbearing and marriage.

> "Why just two people?" is of course trivially easily answered: humans are a socially pair-bonded species.

We are also, you may have noticed, two-sexed. This is even more basic to our biology.

Because you're applying for an official recognition of your marriage for which the government grants various benefits, and the government can in fact refuse it (for siblings for instance)

Yes, many religions are against sibling marriages, but many religions are also against same-sex marriage.

Most of the US puts a value judgement on incestual relationships and I can't say I agree with them, but I do believe there is an argument to be made against incestual marriage: because of the genetic risks to offsprings and the historical tendency to abuse, it is not in the state's interest to promote or encourage incestual relationships through marriage, the social advantages don't compensate for the issues.

> Or are you saying the government should still deny those marriages?

For the reasons above, yes I would say that. But I'm open to the idea that it's only a rationalisation of separately-held beliefs.

Interestingly, Americans love pure-bred dogs despite the genetic problems these pets have.

Why so? That's pretty much what the state does, it provides advantages for situations it wants to see happen more (tax breaks for instance, dispensations or fast tracks, direct monetary grants) and disadvantages for those it doesn't (fines and privation of liberty, mostly). Would you find replacing "the state" by "society" more palatable?

What about "traditional" opposite-sex marriages where children are not produced within the optimal reproductive age window? Should we take away their "advantages"?

Why do you believe creating children is the only social value of marriage? If it figures there at all, it's very low on the totem pole, after all society could simply subsidise rape if that were the point.

Yes indeed, and then you wrote something completely irrelevant.

> Why so? That's pretty much what the state does, it provides advantages for situations it wants to see happen more (tax breaks for instance, dispensations or fast tracks, direct monetary grants) and disadvantages for those it doesn't (fines and privation of liberty, mostly). Would you find replacing "the state" by "society" more palatable?

Said crippled children are often a drain on society. It's not the children's fault of course, but it's still the case.

There are green card marriages.

In the case of the first, we have decided that we will still give the kid citizenship. In the case of the second, we don't allow it (if we catch it).

I'm pretty sure you can marry without a marriage license. You just aren't legally married, i.e. you don't get all the legal benefits.

Why do we let the government deny our marriages in the first place? The law should be changed so that we record and acknowledge marriages, not have a bureau officer approve or deny it.

When you buy real estate, you simply record it. You don't need governmental approval to buy property as far as I know. You will, though, have to pay property tax.

It wasn't the fact it was an "application" that was the problem - you could just say "previously some states refused to register same sex marriages" instead of "previously some states refused to give marriage licenses to same sex couples" and it means the same thing.

The Lovings (of Loving v Virgina) were arrested for getting married in DC.

I can apply for a liquor license and the state ABC can refuse to give me a liquor license or refuse to register a liquor license and it means the same thing.

- Only 1 marriage at a time.

- Must be old enough.

- Must not be too closely related.

- Etc..

The marriage license handles the step of verifying those things. It's mostly a formality.

Inheritance should be simple enough with normal contracts, regardless of marriage (same goes for hospital visitation and medical decision-making, which you didn't mention). Immigration is already completely arbitrary, at the whim of the government. The government could change the immigration effects of marriage just as easily as changing who can get married. That brings us to taxes. Well, that's already an extremely obvious violation of the equal protection clause. Why should married people's taxes be any different than single people's taxes?

Should be, but isn't. Gay couples have been having expensive lawyers write these contracts for twenty years or so and when push comes to shove, they often don't mean shit. That's why we have been pushing for marriage rights.

The other issue is divorce. I know someone who is going through the end of a messy breakup with his long-term boyfriend. They met before marriage or civil partnership were a thing and the process of untangling shared assets, property, mortgages and so on is really complicated.

Yes. It's a shortcut, and I completely understand why people want to take it.

Divorce is pretty easy compared to marriage. Like you said, it's just figuring out who gets what...

No. United State v Windsor (the DOMA case) proved that. Spouses have estate tax exemptions. Windsor sued the IRS for $363,053 in estate taxes that she paid to them because the IRS didn't recognize her and her wife as legally married for tax purposes even thought New York did.

Civil marriage is a form of a "normal contract."

When you have an inalienable right to something, you can't bargain that right away through contract.[1] An inalienable right to define who is family would make it impossible for anyone to enter a "contract" for an exclusive relationship (which alienates your right to marry others you want to have in your family).

You couldn't get married (at least as that term is used now) any more than you can enter a contract to become a slave.

[1] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Inalienable+ri...

Marriage fraud is marriage fraud--an application for marriage doesn't prevent that even presenting themselves before court officers.

However, there's a whole discussion on how tax benefits for married couples is in violation of the equal protection clause...

So if Charles Manson decides you are his wife now, you don't get much of a say in it. Sounds awesome.

And why do the government need to recognize the union? To give them some rights that united people need. Like keeping important possessions (like a house), becoming responsible for kids, taking important medical decisions when the other person can't take them, etc.

Last time I checked, there is no application to have a kid, and kids are defined in law for governmental institutions like negligence of a child, etc.

"In November 2013, following the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, China announced the decision to relax the one-child policy. Under the new policy, families can have two children if one parent is an only child.[90] This will mainly apply to urban couples, since there are very few rural only children due to long-standing exceptions to the policy for rural couples.[91]"

That having been said, one could imagine that a government that didn't evolve from a religiously-knitted culture would have grounded those unions of family more firmly in contract law, not in a construct that's bound up with gender requirements.

... and when you can find such a government on the entirety of Earth, let me know. ;)

However to make that equivalently semantic "government version" union would require changing of a large amount of legal text (e.g. taxation legislation). If the "government version" was simply a stand-in for "married" (i.e., reusing the variable) then what difference has been achieved even semantically?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact

Why do you frame marriage as principally religious, and something the government should keep out of?

There's one way in which governments have screwed up, including state governments, and that's allowing priests to have legal authority. The wedding industry is a revenue stream. In what other way does religion have relation to marriage? Through the laws of Moses, transferred from God?

The government shouldn't be afraid of words. The government should feel free to not trespass upon religion by creating as many alternative marriages as it wants. The government can create a "high-fecundity during wartime" category of marriage if it wants, and grant extra tax benefits. That's a matter of secular policy.

"I really suggest the A41 form for marriage for your case in particular. My cousin and his girlfriend got married under A41 and they've structured their finances like so and so."

No, I think religion shouldn't have messed with a societal institution. Religion has no more right over it than the state does. The state makes the laws, not religion.

That's literally what it is. People could get married in all 50 states before this ruling. At issue was whether it was officially recognized or not, which has been fixed.

They can now be legally recognized. It is still up to churches whether to religiously recognize them.

Take for example the kinship role of fatherhood. This is something the state is rightly committed to taking a stance on, and there's a branch of law (family) to deal with rights, obligations, etc around this kinship bond.

What is a father? Is it a biological father who has not given up his rights? Is it a biological father who has no custody rights? Is it a biological father who has terminated all rights? IS it a non-biological father who has adopted? Is it a step-father who has a different name and doesn't have custodial rights but has been called daddy as long as the child can remember? Is it the man who's name is on the birth certificate but whose dna proves it's not his?

Or should we abandon the word father all together and say "civil custodial guardian." instead to try and separate culture from the state?

The separation of culture from state signifies what you hear all the time on fox news: a culture war. There was a culture war around civil rights 50 years ago too, and now nobody thinks twice about it. Eventually the same will be true around gay rights. The idea that you have to step around terms like wife, husband, or marriage - because they get folks riled up would be like stepping around "father" because it might get some folks riled up - it just doesn't happen to as much right now.

One could argue that marriage is an affinity kinship bond, not a descent kinship bond - and thus fundamentally different than parenthood. But that's a biological distinction - not really a civil distinction given all the tremendous amount of legal work that has gone into removing and assigning parental rights for both biological and non biological children.

Marriage isn't a dirty word, it's not a religious word, it's a cultural word that describes an incredibly important affinity kinship bond. A society with plural cultures does not require that we rename everything under sterile newspeak words.

For all practical purposes, marriage IS a secular contract between two people that helps mediate the rights of two people in a wide variety of domains. To me saying gay people can't marry is akin to saying gay people can't form LLCs.

Maybe the religious side should come up with a new name for their ceremonies to avoid some of the confusion? How about "religious union"? (whatever that means)

I don't see this as anything other than arguing a trivial semantic distinction - that we should use the word "union" for government rights granted to couples instead of "marriage"?

Even if you are right about a slightly better word, who cares? What is the effective difference? Religious and government marriages are different. A "marriage" license issued by a government is indistinguishable from a civil union license.

Why grant religions a monopoly on the use of the word.

In all honesty, this is a non-sensical frankenstein remnant of the separate but equal argument for marriage and civil union. It really has no value.

What's important today is that our country has expanded our liberties and rights, and a lot of people can now live fuller and more secure lives as a result.

Sure. But gay marriage and getting government out of marriage altogether are not mutually exclusive. Government can still get out of the business of marriage (and divorce). Please feel free to petition your legislators to pursue that approach. In the meantime, it is only fair that the gays enjoy the same rights that the rest of us do.

For some years my gay friends were "civil unionised" and I always had to do this two step in my head from the words to the meaning I had for life long loving partnership that still has blazing rows and .... You know - Marriage.

So, this is not about religion (really this is from a country where most people under 60 attending church are doing so they can get their kids into the associated school) - it's not about the tax laws, it's about what society sees, expects and hands out to a married couple.

It makes a difference - there is a difference between a couple who are "to all intents and purposes" married and a couple who are married. Because for the 95% straight relationships out there we read something into why that couple has not gotten married. And we are then forced to read the same into a gay couple. That's why marriage matters. Living together is not quite the same. And we know it.

Would you rather continue the (imo) injustice in pursuit of a pie-in-the-sky reform?

This is not the case, at least in western/european culture. In fact, the reverse is true. Marriage was not thought of as a religious institution until pretty late in the game -- certainly not until after 1000. (For example, marriage was not declared a sacrament until the Council of Trent in the 1500s.)

It's not a difficult thought experiment to imagine the consequences of this: hospitals refusing to allow visitation from people who are – but they do not accept as – members of your family. Employers refusing to extend health coverage, etc.

Government will have a place here so long as there is dispute over the definition of "immediate family".

Civil Union / domestic partnership is a compromise solution that addresses the realities of modern society. You get the benefits of partnership without involving assets. Marriage has always been a more binding thing, and for good reason.

They don't actually believe this, they only say they do. Take any person who says "Get the government out of marriage!" and ask them if they'd like to pay higher taxes and give up the rights that come with marriage. They'll say, "Well, no..."

Simply put, the libertarian cry you suggest is red herring. It's a way to disguise a disgust for gay marriage by making it sounds like you're for "smaller government." If they really believed what they said, they'd have gotten married in a church and then just never filed the documents with the state. Remember, you can get married in a church and not have it recognized by state. Gays were doing it for years.

Certainly, specific aspects of the rights/laws protected under marriage would need to change. Case in point, visitation rights for children. However, that could be altered more simply by creating visitation rights "emotionally invested parties" or something (which also would have worked for the gay or straight communities).

The fact is, all legalizing gay marriage does at a national level is reduce states rights. Yes, there is an emotional argument, that gay couples should be recognized, and I agree they should. However, there were many means to that end, and they chose one that appeased the masses, but perhaps was "less correct," in the sense that it is probably wrong for the government to interfere with any sort of bond between people in private.

If we want government out of marriage, it'd have to be done through Congress and a reformed tax code.

There is nothing religious about this. It's merely the a similar phrase, one that happens to have religious or cultural attachment.

> but because it seems our country doesn't actually want to fix problems at the root.

That's because it can't be fixed at the root. The root has already happened, and the only people with a problem with the fix now are people who think this has anything to do with religion, which it does not.

Marriage is not and was never a religious "thing" in the English legal tradition.

The state that I live in passed a constitutional amendment specifically prohibiting civil unions. The only remaining recourse was the supreme court.