How interesting that the fight to “protect” marriage, and those who are doing everything in their power to keep gay people from participating in it, are the very things, and the very people, that most threaten to actually destroy it.

Now then I remember when CA made marraige legal and they changed the from to Partner A Partner B and people had a hissy fit and sued. While I rolled my eyes at the idea, I saw people gloat, people where genuinely happy that people where upset. It showed how important these words where to the the subconscious, they expected more empathy from these people. Of course the prop 8 campaign used that partner A partner B as just another way to show how gays wanted to take marriage away from all the “good” people in the world.

Taking the government out of the “Marriage” business is pointless. Every law on the books going back to our founding talks of the civil partnership as marriage. You’d have to pass thousands of legal amendments to put all the laws in line with this “decisions” and for what gain? So we can give them the word marriage to the religious as their own special gift? To prove to the religious that the secularist’s real goal is take their marriage away from them? To as gay people sacrifice our place in society? To prove what they knew all along gays where lesser people who didn’t deserve the word marriage?

The truth is the government isn’t in the religious marriage business. They never wanted to get into that particular game. They just chose to recognize the unions that where formed in their country and for convince sake used the standard word for partnership and applied it to laws. Trust me, a civil marriage has no religious component in the eyes of the government, if it did common law marriage would/could never have even formed. I’ve officiated over 4 marriages just by filling out a form and paying some money, as to the religiousness of those four weddings one was a Discordian wedding where we served hot dogs without buns and called on Eris to bless the couple, one was a steam punk wedding where I was dressed as Marie Curie and one was a vampire wedding. Yeah some real powerful religious mojo there. Meanwhile those marriages are just as recognized by the government as my parent’s marriage which was conducted in a catholic church.

No we don’t need to get the government out of the marriage business, especially if we still want them to recognize unions in some form or another. We have to establish to the government and the people that the word marraige is just that a word, a word that has been used for a few hundred years to describe a close union between two things. It is not a sacred right, the church made a sacred right to join people and just like the government they took the most convenient word around which was marraige. Consider in Spanish the word they chose was “To shack up.”

Why do we make this so hard? When used by the government, it is a legal concept, the union of two people under the law, when used by the church it is the product of their sacred right of joining two people. When used by many in the literary world it is the joining of two objects,The marraige blood and steel, poetry and art, form and function.

I’ve always joked of the idea of “taking it back” when applied to language. But seriously I think this is a case where we need to “take the word marriage back.” It was not the sole providence of religious people or religious institution, it belong to society, it is a word that belongs to all of us, it is a part of the human condition and until someone can invent a better word that holds all the meanings of marraige to both the conscious and subconscious I do not wish to willing relinquish my ownership of the word as a human being. Not to punish a group of people, not to make this argument easier to win, not to make it easier to get along with immature religious people who can’t learn how to share.

Sorry for the rant and potential derail, but I’ve seen this concept too much and all really this is the core of the “civil union” or “Partner benefits” argument.

For being a majority Red State 2004, to flipping the State government to Blue in 2006, adding to it in 2008, Colorado has come along way in a short time.