Arguments **against** gay marriage?

[Bryan_Ekers]

Heck, Lefty, I tried a similar breakdown of magellan’s proposal nearly two years ago:

@me

On further reflection, I think I get what magellan is describing:

Hypothetical civil code:

Section 1. “Marriage” is defined as…

Section 2. “Civil Union” is defined as…

Section 3. The set of privileges and responsibilities associated with “Marriage” (see Section 1) and “Civil Union” (see Section 2) is listed below. Any modifications to this list affect both “Marriage” and “Civil Union”. It is not lawful to create exceptions.

Section 3.1. If one spouse is injured the other can make medical decisions…
Section 3.2. Property inheritance…
Section 3.3. Marital confidence in court proceedings…
Section 3.4. Divorce procedures…
… 1000 or so additional sections reflecting the current state of marital law…

Thus, “one set” of laws, I guess, though I’d think of it as two sets with a 99.9% overlap, as long as “marriage” and “civil union” are defined separately.

Does any state actually keep an omnibus list of marital rights and responsibilities? I was under the impression that references to marriage pop up in various statutes across the entire legal code. Tracking them all down and modifying them to specifically expand them to cover civil unions would be quite the undertaking.

And you replied with:

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Yeah, that’s exactly what he’s describing, as near as I can tell. He seems to think that because section 1 and section 2 both point to section 3, it can be described as one set of laws. I, and most other folks, see that section 1 and section 2 are also part of the relevant sets of laws, and so he’s talking about two different sets of laws (one set including section 1 and one set including section 2).

And that thread ended without further comment from magellan.
I’m starting to think progress on this issue is unlikely. At the very least, he doesn’t seem to get (or at least is studiously avoiding the concept of) legal definitions, where something affected by law must also be defined by law. I suppose we could leave the issue undefined, on the assumption that every county clerk in America will understand which couples get the marriage certificates and which get the civil union certificates, rather like voter registration clerks in the South in the 1960s were assumed to know which voters needed to take literacy tests and which ones didn’t.