A priest's blessing doesn't mean squat until you have your marriage license.
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?
Well, because I'm an atheist?
And atheists can't be married? WTF?
Marriage, as far as I am concern, is a secular institution.
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?
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.
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.
The word "marriage" carries with it many social implications.
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.
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?
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.
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