End Marriages for Everyone?

As the Sacramento Bee has reported, two heterosexual Southern California college students – Ali Shams and Kaelan Housewright – want to take the state out of the marriage business. The two have proposed a measure that calls for the term "marriage" to be removed from state laws and replaced with "domestic partnerships." The call makes sense in that the Christianists have succeed in their anti-gay jihad in most states by conflating CIVIL marriage with RELIGIOUS marriage and often have knowing spread lies that religious denominations could be forced to marry same sex couples. Now, Time has a story that looks at the issue and makes a strong case for leaving the word "marriage" to religious ceremonies and providing domestic partnerships only via civil ceremonies. Obviously, the Christianist will oppose this approach since their true agenda is to deprive same sex couples of any rights and to make gays inferior under the law. For the vast middle of the electorate, this might be a middle ground that could tilt the vote our way. If nothing else it would help make it clear to the majority of voters that merely "protecting marriage" is NOT what the Christianists are truly seeking. Here are some story highlights:

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[M]issing altogether in each of those cases — and in countless others of equal religious importance — is any role at all for government. . . . Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned.

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Two law professors from Pepperdine University issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors — one of who voted for and one against Prop 8, which successfully ended gay marriage in California — say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether.

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Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" — anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets.

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Both sets of lawyers agreed that the idea would resolve the equal protection issue. Take the state out of the marriage business, and then both kinds of couples — straight and gay — would be treated the same.

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But the Pepperdine idea does put into a play a new way of thinking — and whether it's part of the court's decision in the Prop 8 case, or whether it makes it way into a new referendum, the idea of getting governments out of the marriage business offers a creative way to thinking about a problem that is otherwise likely to be around for a long, long time.

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Personally, I do not think the proposal is a perfect solution. However, it would knee cap the Christianists and help to fully expose the hate based nature of their agenda which is nothing less than to oppose ANY and ALL laws that would make LGBT Americans fully equal citizens under the law. They truly seek to be able to point to the fact that the civil laws discriminate against gays as a means to support their religious based discrimination. "Protecting marriage" is simply the ruse they use to dupe the lazy media and dim witted voters.