There is no compromise. There is either marriage for any consenting adult, or marriage for none. The rest is just a lot of noise.
This is a brilliant compromise composed entirely of smoke and mirrors.
Perhaps I (and other as well) have been misinterpreting one of religious fundamentalists’ main objections to marriage. Maybe their biggest objection is that somehow allowing gay marriage meant that they would have have to allow those icky who do unspeakable things to get married in any church, by any minister, that the icky gay people wanted. This law, if it clarified anything, clarified that churches can continue to be as homophobic as they want to be within the confines of their church walls.
AFAIK, none of the SSM statutes say anything to the contrary of this anyway, but it must have been very reassuring to them.
Indeed, I’d even be comfortable with an amendment to the U.S. constitution that both:
a) mandates same-sex “civil” marriages be recognized nationwide in all legal matters and be afforded the same privileges as opposite-sex marriages
b) explicitly guarantees the right of private churches to exclude whoever the fuck they want from their membership, marriages, and other ceremonies
Let the homophobes know that they will always have a bastion of Christian hate they can rely on, and let the rest of us move on.
I think, ultimately, this is where it needs to go. Divorcing 
Marriage from Religion and making it entirely a civil affair. After that, if you want to claim that your religion doesn’t allow X type of marriage, go for it, because it carries exactly zero civil weight and most of the rest of us don’t really give a fuck what you think about it.
Hell, 25-30 years from now we may be debating the insertion of two words into the statues.
“or more”.
The great part of this is that the other side is so garbled in its thinking that a worthless gesture is enough that they can hold their heads up high. It’s almost delicious, actually.
Put me down with John Mace: I don’t see how this bill, and the new definition, has changed anything, beyond adding the word “civil” to a number of references to “marriage” in the Minnesota statute book.
And while there is normally a presumption that changes to the wording of a statute are meant to change the law, the courts also recognize that sometimes legislative amendments are simply to clarify the law, to set out explicitly what has always been implicit.
To put it another way, was it the case that before this bill, marriage under Minnesota law was purely a religious right, 1st Amendment notwithstanding?
And finally, no, Minnesota has not invented a great compromise; it’s been done before, in Canada, since we’ve been about 10 years ahead of you guys on this issue: see Civil Marriage Act, S.C. 2005, c. 33, which came into force on July 20, 2005. I imagine that there are similar legal provisions in Dutch, Danish and Spanish law, since those countries implemented SSM before Canada did.
sorry, that came across as snarky - i meant to put a smilie or two into the discussion of the Canadian bill, but hit “reply” instead of “preview” and then got rushed.
Never miss an opportunity to be smug to Americans, NP.
Its not like we don’t give them plenty to work with.
The amendment to the bill adding the word “civil” before each instance of the word “marriage” was, arguably, a legal nullity. The statute always referred only to civil marriage. But even if the amendment was a legal nullity, it was not a political nullity.
The bill, as opposed to the amendment, changed a great deal by striking out “a man and a woman” and inserting “two persons.”
Thanks for the clarification - yes, there’s no doubt that the provision allowing SSM is a fundamental change; didn’t mean to suggest the contrary.
In a more-or-less democratic representative system, your assembly is composed of a sampling drawn from the general population (“people or the land, the common clay of the West, you know…”) rather than of Athenian archetypes. When you want to get something passed, and you see there’s an opportunity to gain just enough votes to get it over the top at the trivial cost of some symbolic rhetorical face-saving for fence-sitters, as opposed to incurring all the effort and risk it takes to crush your hardline enemies, drive them before you and hear the cries of their women, then you take the lower-cost opportunity and praise the other fellow to the heavens for being so firm yet reasonable . It’s how the sausage is made. “Face-saving” can count for a heap when you later need that other SOB’s vote to pass your appropriations or move an unrelated important bill out of committee.
I don’t disagree with that, either. The political value of getting it through was no doubt important. But that’s a separate issue from whether adding “Civil” to the statutes had any legal effect, other than clarifying what was already implicit in the law.
I think there’s some truth to your observation – when SSM was going through NZ parliament there was an attempt to add an amendment / additional text to ensure that churches could choose not to marry same-sex couples. These additions were not accepted; it was pointed out that already existing laws ensured churches had the right to exclude whomsoever they deemed unfit, but it’s worth noting that striking the amendment gave the anti-SSM crowd a chance to wail and tear at their beards and claim they’d all be forced into SSM (or something like that – I’ve never found whatever it is they are claiming all that comprehensible). 
All entirely wooly headed thinking, but don’t underestimate the value of a soundbite for the choir, and if smoke and mirrors gets the changes through, then fire up the smudge pots says I.
I don’t care if it’s compromise or not. I think it’s wonderful and I can’t wait for Illinois to do the same.