Believe me Liz, I would love nothing more than to see the government get out of the marriage business and give civil unions to everyone.

Then if marriage was something that was important to that person, they could choose to go out and have a religious ceremony of any denomination that would marry them.

Unfortunately Meg is right about that not happening. People already had a fit about the terms “bride” and “groom” being removed from the marriage license application, and they fought to have those terms reinstated. They will not lose the term marriage, and we will fight for it as well.

What I want is the the rights and benefits that come with marriage, and not just at a state level. It’s so unfair that a man can fall in love with a foreign woman, marry her, and bring her to this country. If a man falls in love with another man, he’s S.O.L. and either the two of them move to a country that will recognize their love, they say their goodbyes, or they break the law and we call one of them an illegal alien.

Our love is valid, and our relationships are valid. You don’t have to think it’s right, in fact there are lots of things I don’t feel are right and are legal, but I don’t go and make myself a thorn in the side of people who hunt for sport.

Liz – I’m not sure I’d have any problem at all with separating the civil and religious aspects of marriage, pick one, pick both, pick none, all fine. However, I can’t imagine that is realistically in our future. If people are this concerned about how gay marriage is an attack on marriage, can you even imagine what would happen if people proposed getting rid of the word marriage in government all together? Separately, I think its important for everyone to understand that because of the separation of church and state, just because the state marries people doesn’t mean that religions are obligated to. One of the great things about our country is that it has the promise to treat everyone equally under the law, while allowing us to disagree. The problem with Prop 8 is it does not treat people equally under the law. If you don’t want to marry someone of the same sex, you shouldn’t do so, but you also shouldn’t stand in someone else’s way. All that you are stopping is the legal foundation being provided for existing loving families, and that does no good at all.

Finally, to Liz, or to anyone else disagreeing but not commenting, I offer you this invitation. Go out and make a real effort to get to know someone who is LGBT, ideally one that wants to get married. Really get to know them. After you’ve done that, sit back at some point and reflect on what your opinions are. I’ve found that a lot of these opinions stand up well in abstract, but once you know and love someone in the LGBT community, they really start to fall apart. Once you know and love someone who is LGBT, you get to know, in your heart of hearts, that they were born just the way they are, and need to be loved for just who they were made to be. You also start to realize that most of us have the same dreams: fall in love, make a home, make a family. And how can we deny that to people just biased upon the circumstances of their birth?

Again, thank you all. I’m so pleased about this little discussion.

Meg

i feel optimistic, yet so disheartened that we are not evolving as a collective.

I am hesitant to start talking about my reasons, because just like you I am sure there are potential counterarguments to my reasons. I’ve heard them and I am not convinced. At the end of the day, my ‘social’ belief is just a line that I draw somewhere based on my ‘personal’ definition of marriage. My reasons are ones you’ve heard with and probably vehemently disagree with.

Louis, I am not talking about marriage for straight people and domestic partnerships for gays. I am not arguing for ‘separate, but equal.’ I am arguing that straight people and gays and everyone regardless of their romantic or familial status should have the right to create a civil partnership. ‘Marriage’ should no longer be a ‘legal’ term. With whom someone chooses to have a romantic or sexual relationship should not be a determining factor.

That word is so charged with emotional, social, cultural, or religious implications that having the government enforce one or another definition seems unnecessary and impossible.

Liz, as gays we are allowed to have “domestic partnerships” in California. Which is almost like marriage, but not marriage for so many reasons. I won’t go into all of them, but the most obvious being that two people have to co-habitate for six months before they can apply to be domestic partners.

I don’t think I would be taking this so hard if I hadn’t gotten married to my husband. Now it feels like a personal attack on our marriage.