|
98MustGT, well, yes and no. Marriage is way more complicated than chess. Families don't have hard and fast rules about what each member can do.
But the first part of your post is pretty good. I see civil unions and marriage as totally different things. A marriage should be something sanctified by your church, without any legal benefits conferred. Your church gets to decide whether it will bless your marriage or not, but not whether you can visit your partner in the hospital. The problem really seems to be this blending of church and state, that a religious ceremony gets to decide who has legal rights and who doesn't. The best way I can think to deal with this is to make the legal rights separate. If you're married in a church, you still have to go to the state to get a civil union in order to receive the legal rights. In a way this is already true. You have to get a marriage license. All that needs to be done is to change the name of what you get from the state from a 'marriage license' to a 'civil union' Problem solved, then gays who want to still want to get married have to convince a church to give them the title 'married' and any church would be well within their rights to deny that title.
|