The Weekly Standard is truly an echo-chamber. They criticize “liberal” publications like the New York Times or the Washington Post, but those publications offer a variety of opinions.

Clearly the editors of the Weekly Standard have made up their minds. Don’t confuse ‘em with the facts.

Christianity didn’t invent marriage, nor do they (or any other religion) hold the patent on it. So why on earth should we surrender it to them? We should not cower to bullies, no matter what form they take.

The tide is turning in our favor, to take on a new idea risks losing the support we do have (even from within our own community). Civil-Unions-For-All is even less realistic than Marriage Equality, and has the potential to be used against us:

“See, they want to completely destroy marriage! They don’t even want us saying the word in public!!”

Does anyone recall the brouhaha when that (previously divorced) straight couple became irate over the “Party A” and “Party B” boxes on their marriage license? They wrote in Bride and Groom and were told they couldn’t edit the form. Nobody said they couldn’t call themselves Bride and Groom, but apparently a government form is no place for dull, pedantically accurate information. I doubt a move to throw out the word “marriage” for everyone would be seen as anything other than an attack.

A lot of people still don’t understand the difference between Civil Marriage and the Religious Institution. Do you honestly expect them to understand that their relationship is being rebranded as a Civil Union?

It’s the normalizing effect of the word marriage not the equalizing effect that’s so critical. When you think of Bobby and Billy being married you think of their kinship ties, and their passage from bachelors to caring husbands, and their interconnections to the web of the human family.

But thinking of Bobby and Billy as “partners” in a “civil union” then most people won’t see those connections. You don’t see them as two people that maintain loving responsible relationships with each other and their families. Apparently, Sam just thinks: fun, fun, fun.

Some people may think such parsing is nitpicking, but I appreciate you reminding me that the difference between “equal” and “normal” in many peoples’ minds is pretty big.

I want to write something at length about this, but frankly, I have too much to do right now. And I’m tired.

but this much. Ironically enough, it was Alan chambers who gave mne my first inkling of this when he made some statement that had gay marriage been available to him, he might never have been able to straighten himself out–not that he has. There were some other comments around that that got me thinking.

Then there is a formerly gay guy posting at huffpost who actually clued me in on it. He said in his postings that he had no problems with gay people having DP or CU’s, but marriage was going to be only for hets (and-wanna-be-hets-but-ain’t)like him. He was fairly ugly on the subject in some ways, very very defensive. It was fairly clear to me that like chambers, he needed people to validate his decision to be heterosexual, yet unlike many ex-gays, he didn’t insist on it for others.

but this he did insist on. And that is when it hit me that marriage would normalize gay people in his eyes, which would then invalidate his decision. but separate but equal would not. The supreme irony, of course, is that he is a black man.

If we are equal, then there is no justifiable reason for a separate name. It would be pointlessly redundant. The fact that some people feel that a separate name is necessary indicates they do not feel we are equal.

To give over the full array of rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples, you would simply let them marry. To give them everything but the name is to give 9/10ths of the equality.

This is not about calling an apple an orange. This is about the fact that they are both fruits, but some people want to call one a Fruit and the other a Civil Plant Ovary.

I don’t know whether any organizations or businesses have taken the step of saying, “we recognize marriages but not domestic partnerships”, but, if they do, it will make the need to extend marriage–and call it marriage–to same-sex couples even more important.