Shii Posted:

To my knowledge, gays want equal representation as far as taxes go and whatnot; that’s their primary argument for why gay marriage should be allowed. If that’s the real case, then declaring the legal side of marriage a Civil Union and giving them the equal rights they want should take care of that, while letting the staunchly opposed still retain the sanctity of their ritual.

OK, there we go – that’s your error. Gays don’t want “equal representation as far as taxes go and whatnot”. They want equal recognition in their right to exist as individuals and couples. Which they won’t get with a special clbum of “not-marriage” to cover them, while straight couple can continue to have the traditional “marriage.”

Imagine if I said “For most of our history, a ‘voter’ was a white male with significant property. Therefore, we need to keep that tradition. So, while everyone else gets to take part in the electoral process, from now on, only white men will be able to describe themselves as ‘voters’, and only white men will be able to say they ‘voted.’ Women and minorities need not fear, though – the legal language will be ‘electoral engagement’ and everyone will be able to ‘electorally engage’. It’s just that you can only ‘electorally engage’, while white men can choose to describe it as either ‘electoral engagement’ or the traditional ‘voting’ – they get the choice, and you don’t.”

It sets a pretty solid line of inferiority.

Edit – Christ, my head is stuck in HTML mode. Damn BBCode.