Darth Wong wrote:Except that people already regard unions and marriages as being the same thing, and have for a very long time. "Marriage" is simply the English word for a concept which presently cuts across cultures and races and religions. "Union" is a much more generic word, which is precisely why "marriage" has been and is still called "marriage".
Removing the word from civil marriages would represent an enormous concession to the legion of assholes who think that a civil marriage isn't a "real" marriage. Appeasement is no way to deal with these donkey-fuckers.
The reason I suggest that is that it entirely saves the state the trouble of defining what "marriage" is--frankly, the state's legitimate business in regards to marriage's legal status stops at defining what rights the legal contract confers anyway, so why not call it a civil union or civil partnership contract and let the individuals involved decide what marriage is. Though I can see some problems with that--for example, business partners who get "married" in order to gain legal immunity from testifying against each other. And perhaps you have a point in saying marriage is a universal human concept and there's no need to replace it with some legalese.
Onto the issue of the Constitutional amendment. Firstly, don't panic. There have been, IIRC, some 10,000 proposed amendments to the Constitution, only 27 went through. Of those, 12 were passed while the Founding Fathers were still alive and politically active, one took 200 years to ratify, and one of them was passed explicitly to repeal another one. This amendment, assuming it even makes it out of committee, needs 2/3 of both houses to vote for it in order for it to even get to the ratifying stage, and if you think there's a reasonable chance of that happening, I invite you to look at the partisan breakdown of the U.S. Congress. Finally 37 states have to ratify it.
And in all fairness, I should point out that from what I read of the article, Bush is not trying to push a Constitutional amendment (the President has no part in the amendment process, though he can use his bully pulpit to encourage it along). He's assigned government lawyers to find a Constitutional justification for a Federal law defining marriage. That's an atroious enough violation of state sovereignty as it is, but he has nothing to do with the proposed amendment.
The Defense of Marriage Act, by the way, does not forbid gay marriages. What it does do is exempt states that don't have gay marriage from the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, which would otherwise force them to honor gay marriages from other states (that's why people used to go Reno to get divorced: the other states had to respect Nevada's much looser divorce laws, even if the divorced couple did not meet the requirements for a legal divorce in their home state).
