Quote Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy View Post
If you want to sanctify marriage and keep reserved it for men and women then you will actually have to ban civil marriage altogether.

You can still have your religious marriage ceremony in front a crowd who worship Bongo the Moon God but it will have no civil weight.
The perfect solution, they didn't even have civil marriage in England until the Barebones Parliament introduced it in 1653, in Scotland it wasn't until even much later, you counted as being married if you had a couple of witnesses there.

The only reason we kept it is because the nuclear family became the basic social unit for so long. Gay couples aren't the basic social unit and they don't keep society running, so why should they get the privileges (which is what civil marriage is, it is a privilege not a right, negative freedoms and all that).