[indigochill]

> Why don't Christians want to enter "christian unions" and cede control over the word "marriage" to the state as a legal construct?

Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one. "Civil Union" is the name that designates the legal construct, as the name implies.

> Alternatively, why does the state not abandon the idea of "marriage" altogether and only recognize domestic partnership?

I think this is something everyone could get on board with. It lets the religious sphere take back the "marriage" term while putting everyone on equal footing in the civil sphere.

...then we get to argue over what qualifies someone to be a husband/wife vs a partner!

[dragonwriter]

> Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one.

Whatever they “see”, it is, in fact, a legal institution, has been such as long as it has existed at all, and is a legal institution that in most modern liberal democracies (and many other regimes) has been entirely separate, and regulated differently, from any religious institution of the same name for quite some time.

There's lots of institutions like that, because religion and civil law weren't historically separate domains, and many institutions (minority/adulthood, for one pair) exist which formerly were shared between the two and continue to frequently exist in both domains.

That doesn't give religions the right to impose their rules on the public institutions, or to demand the public institution change its name.

[swatcoder]

> Because many Christians to varying degrees don't see marriage as a legal construct (whether exclusively, primarily, or at all, depending on the person), but as a religious one

It's not quite so simple, though. In most countries without a state religion or with modern humanist foundations, they already recognize it as both.

Pedantic Catholics wouldn't recognize the religious validity of a marriage involving a divorced person blessed by a different church, but they don't challenge the legal validity.

Likewise, almost all Christians accept the legal validity of a marriage involving two hetersexual Muslims or atheists, even while rejecting that it carries the same religious validity as their own.

Most are totally accustomed to the difference between legal marriage and religious marriage and that requirements for such marriages vary. Their resistence to homosexual marriage has other roots.

[dragonwriter]

> Pedantic Catholics wouldn't recognize the religious validity of a marriage involving a divorced person blessed by a different church, but they don't challenge the legal validity.

A pedantic Catholic would note that the Church actually presumes the religious validity of non-Catholic marriages between people who are non-Catholics, even though such marriages would be invalid for a Catholic, and while the issue of prior divorce makes this a more difficult question, it only does so because it then requires a definitive resolution of the presumed validity of the former marriage.

This is not-infrequent source of complications if one of the partners, after divorce in the second marriage, seeks to marry a Catholic in the Catholic Church, so its a fairly well-documented issue, if perhaps obscure to people who aren't pedantic Catholics.

[hayst4ck]

> I think this is something everyone could get on board with.

I don't think you've met very many Republicans, certainly not the ones I'm related to or have interacted with.