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The nonsense that marriage amendments are designed to protect marriage from lots of people not just gays is one of the most intellectually bankrupt arguments you have ever posted on this topic on this forum, IL, and you know it. At no point during any political campaign for a marriage amendment has anyone involved in it made any mention of anything but its application to homosexuals.
The point remains, arguments against gays marrying have everything to do with religious bigotry, just as every argument against blacks and whites marrying had everything to do with with racism. If more people would fess up to that, we'd have a better starting place for this conversation instead of these absurd quasi-legal justifications.
As for "let's just give it a different word," so long as the word applied by the state is different for a different-sex marriage than it is for a same-sex marriage, it's not equal. And it never will be. And you can all go read Brown v. Board of Education to learn why.
Now...if the STATE performed, let's say, legal marriages or civil ceremonies or civil unions on EVERYONE and NON-STATE ACTORS (i.e. churches) performed ceremonial marriages or marriages or what have you, that might be something to talk about, because then the split is not based on who is getting married but rather who is doing the marrying. That system would allow people who hate gays for whatever arbitrary reason to prevent them from getting married by their chosen church or what have you and allow others who don't hate people for no reason to allow them to get married, and the state-the great equalizer-wouldn't care who you are, so long as you followed the legal formalities.
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