Marriage

I love my wife and I am happily married, BUT, I think that the government should stop regulating marriage. Civil unions appear to carry with them the same bundle of legal rights as marriages, but many in the gay community argue that it still falls short of a marriage. A couple of years ago, a gay rights activist visited my graduate school and talked with us about it. He argued that marriage conveys a social and religious acceptance that civil unions do not. In short, he said that a state-sanctioned gay marriage would confer a sense of religious acceptance to the couple. WHAT? At that point, I decided to be against government sanctioned marriages. When getting a document from a courthouse and going through an unregulated ceremony conveys religious acceptance, we have exchanged religion for law and sanctioned the state as a religious institution. My solution is to only allow the state to grant civil unions, and only allow religious organizations to grant marriages. Thus, the state gets to give its bundle of legal contracts without discrimination, and religions get to sanction what they believe is a correct marriage before God. I used to laugh at the Italians and Mexicans who had a two-stage process for marriage. They go to the court to get the civil marriage done, and then they go to the church to get the religious marriage done. Now I think that they have it right.