Time Article on Ending Marriage

This is making the rounds on Facebook, so I thought it foolish not to post. I think I see like four or five people posting it. 

Time discusses a point that has sometimes been discussed, quietly, by gay folks themselves -- what about just getting rid of marriage all together, if it's such a religious institution. What right does the government has in getting involved?

From the article:

Two law professors from Pepperdine University issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage in a paper published March 2 in the San Francisco Chronicle. The authors — one of who voted for and one against Prop 8, which successfully ended gay marriage in California — say the best way out of the intractable legal wars over gay marriage is to take marriage out of the hands of the government altogether. (See pictures of the busiest wedding day in history.)

Instead, give gay and straight couples alike the same license — a certificate confirming them as a family, and call it a "civil union" — anything, really, other than "marriage." For those for whom the word marriage is important, the next stop after the courthouse could be the church, where they could bless their union with all the religious ceremony they could want. The Church itself would lose nothing of its role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that it finds in keeping with its tenets. And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for "married" couples.

"While new terminology for all may at first seem awkward — mostly in greeting-card shops — [it] dovetails with the court's important responsibility to reaffirm the unfettered freedom of all faiths to extend the nomenclature of marriage as their traditions allow," wrote professors Douglas W. Kmiec and Shelley Ross Saxer. Kmiec voted for Prop 8 because of the teachings of his Catholic Church and his notion of religious liberty, but has since said he believes the Court should not allow one group of Californians to marry while denying the privilege to others.

It's something to be thought about, isn't it? No other religious rite is honored by the government. It's nice that it's getting a little mainstream play.

The ultimate equalizer: elimination.