Andrew Sullivan notes the Get The Government Out Of Marriage Altogether argument.  In California a couple of noble idiots are trying a lawsuit to do just that.  Douglas Kmiec approves…

Give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" — anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for "married" couples.

This is a wonderful solution to some problem somewhere in a galaxy far, far away perhaps, but not to the problem of same-sex marriage here on Planet Earth.  Once more: how many of these state amendments bulldozed through by the religious right also ban civil unions outright?  How many of them are written to ban any and all rights and benefits associated with marriage, never mind civil unions?  How many times do the bigots have to complain that anything that gives same sex couples any sort of recognition at all is unacceptable before you begin to listen to them?  How many of the Common Ground initiative laws proposed in Utah, after the Mormon Church averred that they weren’t really against giving same sex couples Any rights, did the Mormon church actually allow to pass?  What…not even hospital visitation? 

At long last, do you still not get the depth of the hatred here?  The word they’re choking on isn’t ‘marriage’, it’s ‘homosexual’.