[curun1r]

That's the frustrating part about this issue...it's basically all semantics. The simple solution would have been to remove all recognition of marriage by the government and replace it with the concept of civil unions between any two consenting adults. There shouldn't even be a requirement of a romantic relationship...why should the fact that two people have sex or live together have any bearing on how they file their tax returns, how medical decisions are made or how property is disposed of? Hell, there's plenty of married people who are separated and no longer having sex or live together and yet they enjoy the legal perks of marriage.

Once you limit the government's role to recognizing a contract, albeit one that's common and standardized, between two adults, marriage becomes the domain of the church. If your church wants to deny marriage to homosexuals, the first amendment gives them the right to do that.

[tommorris]

Your "simple solution" would require the invalidation of all straight people's marriages. Politically, that's about as toxic as proudly saying you are going to be building a pre-school on top of a nuclear waste dump.

I wrote a long rant about this a while back: http://tommorris.org/posts/2555