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.
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.