Wow, I don’t check for a couple of days, and this thread explodes! I’m glad… it was nice to read this debate, even if I disagree with a couple of the points made.

One little thing I want to address is in regards to Cid’s post – you argue, if I am reading correctly, for the “nobody gets married in the legal sense” POV, right? But you say that religious groups can then call it marriage – however, I would argue that this still removes the right of every individual to call his or her union a marriage; something like 16% of the country does not identify with any organized religion, and I daresay there is at least one person in that group who would like to call his or her union a marriage. So are we saying that only religious people are allowed to get “married”? Even if the law doesn’t call it marriage, we’re saying that there are still separate rules about how things should be called in parlance, and as has been explained earlier, parlance is very powerful. Even if in an ideal world we think “marriage” and “civil union” and everything else should be the same, the nuance is different and you can’t legislate the way people view certain words.

Otherwise, I guess most of what I’ve wanted to say has been said, probably more eloquently than if I’d responded, anyway. I used to be a big proponent of the “nobody gets married in the legal sense” compromise, but as time goes by it’s more and more clear that separate is not equal, and it really can’t be.

Thank you all for making my first thread reasonably successful and more or less troll-free ^_^