There's no reason to change the name of the legal agreement known as "marriage" to "civil union" other than to pacify the superstitious.

[1] It is worth noting that while there are passages in the Hebrew/Christian bible that advocated "one man, one woman" marriages, there are plenty of examples of "Biblical heroes" who had multiple wives (David and Solomon come to mind).

Same sex couples adopting is a very sensitive issue, I am lucky to have friends who adopted (in Germany we have less than 10 men couples having adopted), the boy is now a bit less than 2 year old and I am still wondering if this is a good thing or not. This is why I completely understand that the general population can react strongly as even me, being able to play on the floor with the little boy, being a rational kind of person and seeing the little boy smiling and happy, can still have some doubts.

Every one is allowed to have a baby. But, oh dear, if somebody wants to take care of a kid that has no parents.

Personally, i dont think religious people are fit parents. Should i now campaign against religious people taking care of children?

Or maybe, just maybe, people should just give the freedom to others they expect for themselves.

I have no moral authority over any one, nor does any one have a moral authority over me.

Why is it that fascism is allowed to flourish, as long as the fascists call it a religion. And how is that fair towards the 1% of religious folk that are actually religious? ( actually religious == using religion to guide your own lifechoices, instead of using it judge/oppress others and play god)

For example, if the child was adopted by an abusive alcoholic then this is a case of the terrible neglect and perfidy of the state... even though gobs of people are naturally born to abusive alcoholics and taking them away would usually be regarded as an instance of the terrible neglect and perfidy of the evil, bureaucratic state.

The state must have a perfect track record in order to be merely tolerated. Otherwise, it will be overthrown. So by our own stupid irrationality, we ensure that the state is irrationally defensive. If the state could solve a problem 90%, but 10% are still left over, that 10% becomes the awful perfidy of the state, so we create an environment where the other 90% are completely ignored because at least it's "nobody's fault."

Can these differences be found within a same sex couple? Most likely, also not in the same way as woman/man. Is it better 2 loving fathers instead of living alone in an institution, definitely.

Non exceptional same sex couples with children is a fundamental change in the society, we need to accept that it will take time for this change to become accepted.

The kid will still grow up in a same-sex household. He/she will still think of themselves has having two dads or two moms. The only thing you're denying is the ability for the other partner to sign their permission forms, visit them in the hospital, or be officially recognized as a parent by the government and society.

It will take time for the rules of the society to adapt to the changes in the society.

I have a friend who was raised by a same-sex couple. One was a biological parent, and they had to go through huge complex legal procedures to compensate for inheritance rights, adopting the child and others as he was a stranger-in-law to the non-biological parent that raise him.

I have a lesbian friend who has 3 biological kids of her own. The only social issues they've faced are from other adults being uncomfortable with it. But it's a bigger issue when those people vote against civil marriage and deprive those kids of legal protections kids of hetrosexual marriages have.

Realizing that this affords some protections for those cluelessly love struck who could be left with no legal recourse should the relationship dissolve, it still pisses me off quite a bit that I need permission of any sort from the government to practice a religious rite.

So long as this is the case there will be opposition to any legally allowed civil marriage that doesn't follow the traditional definition.

Do you want to have this fight every time a new type of union wants the legal protections of marriage?

My solution is a compromise, the alternative is to have this fight for the next few years, and then a few years later start it all over again for poly-marriages.

>There's no reason to change the name of the legal agreement known as "marriage" to "civil union" other than to pacify the superstitious.

Since the "superstitious" make up a large percent of the country you might want to find a way to "pacify" them.

If we can compromise so that the majority of people are happy and no one's rights are violated, where's the problem? Unless you just don't want to "pacify" the "superstitious" out of spite.

Yet there it is, in black and white, in every statutory code in the country.

The statistics I was able to Google up show support for gay marriage at 43% of the US and against 47%. So it's not like it's some tiny percentage who are for it, and it's not even a majority who are against it.

Personally, no, I don't want to have this fight. I also don't want to have to fight about evolution being taught in schools. Unfortunately some members of the population render this a necessity.

No, we write our laws based on reason and justice, but there is nothing wrong with taking people's preferences into account as long as those preferences don't violate the rights of other people.

Assuming you were for a single payer healthcare system. Would you object to a president pushing for a single payer socialized healthcare system, but calling it something else in order to appease people who hate the word "socialized"?

A word only has a meaning insofar as a culture decides to use that meaning. So yes, the preferences of individual members of the culture taken collectively are by definition relevant to the debate.

So hopefully we can agree that the current definition of a word is solely about preference.

We are having a problem coming to a consensus over the meaning of the word "marriage."

Group A says it means "one man and one woman" Group B says it means "two people" Group C says it means "any group of consenting adults"

If you are in Group A, using the word marriage in a legal document, in the context of "any two people", means you think the government sides with the preferences of Group B, and vice versa.

Two (or more) sides disagree, so a compromise is proposed--we don't use the contested word, we create a new word that everyone can agree on.

Imagine if 2 groups argued about the definition of the word "planet."

Group A says a planet "is spherical" Group B says a planet "must clear its neighborhood"

The governments starts using the Group B definition, but almost half of the people still use the Group A definition.

In order to avoid a huge fight we compromise and come up with a new word that includes objects that fit both definition, solely for use in legal documents.

The name of the civil contract is obviously important to people on both sides of the issue. As you've pointed out, many people have trouble distinguishing between the legal definition and the religious one. Those people are no doubt going to be upset that the government is telling them they aren't "married" anymore, but only "civil unioned" ("civilly united"? There's another problem, it doesn't verb well).

Even if this compromise would be acceptable, the government has no business rewriting laws to cater to certain religions. That's pretty much exactly the thing America was founded NOT to do. We even wrote it into the first amendment. Should we make a law making it illegal to draw pictures of Mohammed, since that offends some people's religious sensibilities?

That's a good point, like I said it's just a proposal and would need to gain public support.

> Should we make a law making it illegal to draw pictures of Mohammed, since that offends some people's religious sensibilities?

Nope, because that limits the speech of the drawer.

However if a large group of people objected to the government's use of the word crusade to refer to say some kind of program called "crusade against hunger", I wouldn't have a problem discussing changing it from "crusade against hunger" to "fight against hunger"

The key difference is no one's rights are being violated, the government is just changing a word.

If the government stopped referring to policemen as policemen and policewomen, but started using the term police officer that's fine with me. It doesn't affect what I do. It doesn't stop me from calling them policemen and policewomen.

There is no reason for the state to name anything "marriage" or give any special recognition to the concept.

We have such a contract. It's called marriage. If you look at the law of marriage, there is nothing in there that's predicated on there being a woman and a man, and there is nothing in there that is specific to religion. In the United States, which never had ecclesiastic courts, marriage has always been a strictly civil, contractual legal construct.

The problem with a civil union contract is that the law is full of references to marriage. E.g. in the law of evidence there is the principle of marital immunity, which is that spouses can't be forced to testify against each other in criminal trials. Do you want to go back and rewrite all of that?

Thus the old laws applied to everyone,without a need for someone to go at them with eraser and ink.

That's right. Proponents of civil union say that everyone (including heterosexuals) should be granted civil union, and somewhere in the anals of law it should say "civil union is legally equivalent to marriage".

You know that's pretty easy to fix, right?

There may be other problems with his proposed solution, but it's trivial for a legislature to say "where we said BAR in the past, we also mean BAZ."

That some religions have a "marriage" ceremony is orthogonal. What makes you married in the legal sense is the marriage certificate you get from the government. Any ceremony is just for show. What the US Government defines as marriage is purely a civil thing.

But the immediate question, regardless of whether government should be involved in marriage or not, is whether we should pass laws to cause the government to treat this institution that it is involved in in a fair and equitable way (and reject laws that would enshrine unfairness).

Marriage should not be a purely religious ceremony. It should be an individual's choice, consent of both the partners.

I don't agree that a religious institution HAS to validate/conduct a religious ceremony. Again, it should be left to the individual.

I don't. However ~50% of American's don't support it.

At the same time I don't think there is a legal reason to ban gay marriage.

This is a proposed compromise between both sides.

As far as I can tell, the only feasible way that we get there is by the states allowing same-sex marriage, and then the FedGov comes along for the ride, followed by FedGov doing a ''mutatis mutandis'' change in law to talk about civil unions.