Quote Originally Posted by Askthepizzaguy View Post
I don't think that standing in the way of what two consenting adults want to do with their lives, affording them the same rights and privileges as the rest of humanity, is something we should do just to make sure Christians don't get offended. If you've already conceded that gays have a right to be gay, have a right to do gay things together, and can be afforded ALL the rights of a couple, and the only sticking point now is that you don't like it compared to your "holier than theirs" marriage, it's time to let it go. They are going to call it marriage. You can't really stop them from getting married in their hearts, and you don't, apparently, want to stop them from having all the legal rights afforded to marriage. The bottom line is it makes you feel all icky when you have their relationships compared to your more "Godly" form of love. But at the end of the day, you have to deal with things that are offensive to your religious sensibilities, and how you personally feel about the issue does not have any bearing on the matter. Saying it makes you sad for them to have equal treatment and the same word, when you're willing to give them equal treatment, is losing the argument. It is just a word. And Christians do not have a monopoly on marriage as a word, nor does any religion. And challenging someone's legal marriage purely on the grounds you don't like it called marriage, though you don't challenge anything they do otherwise... it's absurd.
Regardless of what many (most?) Christians want, this will become the dominant fact. It's been called marriage for centuries. Gays want to be married, not unioned. Gays and those who favor that viewpoint will label it "marriage" regardless of what governments or anyone else wants it called. If the churched shift their preferred label to some new term, gays will do so as well in order to continue their basic quest (having the gay lifestyle viewed as and treated as perfectly normal in all respects). So, unless we are ready to persecute them and force them back into the closet through discriminatory statutes and viscious social pressure, the issue is lost.