Laws in the US that restrict the rights of Christians

nothing

There's a difference between marriage and religious marriage. I don't care much for religious marriage, but marriage is more than just a legal issue.When I tell people my wife and I are married, I say, "We're married" and everyone around me will automatically assume that the woman standing next to me is the most important person in my life. It's the social recognition of two people's love for each other.Perhaps you are willing to start telling people that you and limbo...zimbo... wimbo... whatever are civil unionized, but I'm not. In the eyes of many, if not most, people, civil union is just another way of preventing gay people from the social recognition they deserve. It's like Virginia privatizing their entire school system just so they wouldn't have to desegregate back in the civil right era.Currently, we don't have a religious marriage institution in our government, so your question really is not a question at all, but I know what you mean. Schraf, perhaps you are willing to throw away the term "marriage" for whatever that's under your roof, but myself and many gay people I know are not. Us straights have enjoyed the institution and the social recognition that come hand in hand with marriage for a long long time now. You're telling me that you are willing to toss all of that away just so gay people can't get married and enjoy what the rest of us have been taking for granted for generations?Virginia closed down all their public schools for 5 years just so they wouldn't have to desegregate. It finally ended when the Supreme court declared that a state may not privatize their school system to avoid desegregation. I can't help but notice the similarity between this move and what you guys are proposing right now.

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

Maybe. But I've been in favor of removing the state's role in marriage and replacing it with civil unions long before gay marriage became an issue. For precisely this reason: marriage has always been, even before the gay marriage issue, a religious institution, and the state has no business entangling itself in religious issues.

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In many respects, the Bible was the world's first Wikipedia article. -- Doug Brown (quoted by Carlin Romano in The Chronicle Review)

I don't understand why on Earth you think you would have to start doing that. Christ you're being as ignorant as the people who oppose homosexual rights because they think the next act down the pipe is the government forcing them to give fellatio to another man. I don't see any similarity. If you want to go with the schools, it's a lot more like setting up public schools so that education of children was no longer something we depended on churches for.Why not do the same with marriage? Let's have public civil marriage that anybody can take part in, and then the "till death do us part" stuff can be the province of church, or whatever personal ritual symbology you prefer.

But this is essentially what we have right now. A priest's blessing doesn't mean squat until you have your marriage license. Right now, you could get married in front of a judge or in front of one of the Elvis impersonators. Sounds pretty secular to me. Well, because I'm an atheist? Marriage, as far as I am concern, is a secular institution. A religious marriage is something else.What you guys are proposing is we get rid of the word marriage completely and call it a "civil union" while labeling the word "marriage" as religious. How would an interracial couple who wanted to get married in the deep Jim Crow south feel if they were told that they couldn't get married but could instead get a civil union? Like I said before, it's not just the legal or religious aspects of it. The word "marriage" carries with it many social implications. One of those is the instance recognition that the woman I'm MARRIED to is the most important person in my life. That's right, crashfrog, I am very ignorant. This ignorant man is not going to budge just because one side didn't want to allow gay people to get married (and benefit from both the legal AND social rights that come with marriage) and the other wanted to get rid of secular marriage completely just when marriage is within reaching distance of many hopeful gay people.The word means everything, crash.

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Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

And the marriage license is tissue paper until a religious ceremony is performed. Marriage and religion are all wrapped up together.Why don't we extract them? Why don't we make it much more abundantly clear that there's a difference between the legal relationship you have with each other in the eyes of the government, and the personal relationship you're asking for the community's approval of?Why don't we make it so clear, in fact, that stop calling them the same thing? And atheists can't be married? WTF? In this country? I wish. No, it's not at all secular. It includes a secular component, but it's all wrapped up in religion, too. Why don't we unwrap it a little bit? That's not at all what we're talking about. Try to pay attention. We're talking about taking the suite of legal rights you get from the government by adopting a certain status and calling that "civil union", and then taking the symbolic act of joining two people in a romantic relationship before their friends and family, and calling that "marriage."You want a marriage, that's between you, your spouse, and whoever you think has the spiritual or symbolic authority to marry you. Hell, maybe that's nobody at all. Maybe you just call yourself "married." Maybe your local church doesn't feel the same way, they don't have to consider you married. Whatever. Since there's no legal status associated with the term it hardly matters.You want the rights of marriage, you go down to the courthouse and fill out the papers for a "civil union." Nobody can take those rights away or deny them, regardless of what their own personal religion says about marriage. It's made irrelevant by the fact that these are no longer the rights of marriage, they're the rights of civil unions, which have nothing at all to do with religion. So the gay-bashing churches can't do dick about it. We're not eliminating any of the social implications. We're just transplanting the legal implications into another construct, to deal with the fact that everybody's different religion has a different idea about who can be in a marriage and who can't be. Told by who that they couldn't get married? Their church? Jesus, Taz, don't you know that's already happening? Only, instead of being able to reject their church's conception of what marriage is and substitute their own and still get the same legal rights, they're denied those rights because the government defers to the church on who can get married or not.This way everybody gets a civil marriage if they want the legal rights. This way anybody can claim to be married to anybody else, because the term no longer has any legal meaning - just social meaning. If you want people to apply that meaning to your relationship, you tell people that you're married - because who can stop you from doing that? You could call you and your wife "pair-bonded" or "perma-mated" or even "heart-bound" if you wanted, it's a free country. And by taking the legal meaning out of the word "marriage", you and your wife, or my uncle-in-law and his husband can go ahead and use that term, too, and no one has any basis to disagree.

I think crash and Taz might be talking past each other. Crash seems to pull it together at the end of the last post, but just to be sure:There is a legal issue and there is a religious issue (if any).Currently, the single word "marriage" applies to both. That doesn't mean that one necessarily leads to the other. I'm simply saying that there is a series of steps that you can take in the courthouse that people call "getting married" and there is a series of steps that you can take in a church that people call "getting married."There is a request to make those two things distinct. I don't think anybody is saying that there should be a legal contract of marriage and a legal contract of civil union. I think what is being said is that there is only one contract. But in a nod to those who go into apoplexy over the concept of using the word "marriage" to apply to couples of the same sex, we'll call the legal process "civil union" and the religious process "marriage," at least officially.This would require, however, that the word "marriage" be stricken from all legal documents and replaced with "civil union."This wouldn't stop anybody from calling their civil union a "marriage," though. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but for some reason I'm thinking that the official terminology for ending a legal marriage is "dissolution of the marriage contract." It's just that everybody calls it a "divorce." Since everybody knows what is meant by "marriage," the fact that the piece of paper has the words "Civil Union" at the top rather than "Marriage" (and that there is no legal paper anywhere that says, "Marriage" at the top) is really irrelevant.Everybody's gonna call it "marriage."

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Since there are well over a thousand known Federal laws and ordinances that specify the term marriage and easier method would be to pass one law that simply said that anywhere the term marriage occurred the term Civil Union may be substituted.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

i think it's a great idea. it's worked in france since revolution year 1.