These are just a couple of ideas that I have only just thought of and have not yet reasoned out what the consequences might be. I’d be interested in the opinions of anyone, Christian or otherwise.
The purpose of these suggestions is to provide Christians with a means of declaring that marriage is a God-given institution, that it is NOT a question of whether the state ought or ought not permit same-sex marriages because the state is in fact unable to do so. Whether people are married in fact is entirely independent of the legal status of that relationship. Whatever privileges are arbitrarily granted by the state to individuals may be by design in harmony with whether they are in fact married. Or they may not be, since they are just that - arbitrary.
So here they are. I don’t know if these have been offered anywhere else, so if so, please share links.
(1) Churches should disassociate themselves entirely from the legal institution of marriage. If you want to legalize your “union,” you would no longer do that at the church. Pastors would renounce their right to make legally binding unions. You would have to separately go down to the courthouse for that.
(2) Christians should come up with new symbols of marriage to replace the wedding ring, symbols that are explicitly religious in nature. Sure, nothing would prevent non-Christians from adopting them, but why would they? I’m aware there are some churches that allow same-sex unions to be identified as marriages, but what to do about that falls into the more general category of “what to do with churches who try to replace revelation with their own opinions” Same-sex marriage among Christians would have to be addressed in that context.
The main concern I see here is that Christians don’t want legal status extended to same sex unions because they think that church and state are already too separated, that the state is gradually going from a-religious to anti-religious and same-sex unions are a sign of that. However, I would argue that the assault on the premise of absolute truth by moral relativists is a more fundamental and more dangerous evil. Christians have to escape the framing of the question as it is today – set up by the relativists – and simply say, “It is moot. It is not that you may not legislate it, you cannot legislate it.” Proposition (1) is one way to do that.
I should probably also add that as a Catholic I would be the first to suffer from exclusion here. I’m legally “married” to a woman who is in fact married to another man, although now legally “divorced.” No, I don’t wear a wedding ring.