Apologies if I misunderstand.

IANAL, but I believe that under strict scrutiny standards, the state has a compelling interest in securing certain rights for married people, E.g., inheritance rights ensure that strangers don't enter homes and walk away with as much as they can carry when someone dies.

If we were to give up the word "marriage," we could run face-first into a mountain of common law and case law that affords certain rights to married people. And we could provide a thousand niches for enemies of equality to pry away rights one by one.

I believe the state's interest in deputizing ministers and certain civil authorities to preside over marriages is to ensure that the couple are alive, present, of age, and acting of their own free will.

Please let's be careful that as we encourage secular marriages, we never give up the word "marriage."

The state has no business using the word marriage as it, [the state] cannot recognize a religious ceremony of one religion while denying the definition of a marital union of another religion. It violates Separation of Church and State.

It is pointless to call either "marriages" as they are not. A "Marriage" contract is merely a bundling of specific statues that apply to a union.

The ancient Romans viewed marriage as a family matter, to be arranged by the male heads of the two families. The wedding was held at the family home. There was a contract that the couple agreed to and signed, and a feast. A wealthy family could add religious rituals at the temple of their choice, but this was extra. Civil authority was not involved.

Early Christianity adopted this Roman marriage model, along with the body of Roman law and bureaucracy that it adopted. The problems started a bit later when the Catholic Church decided to control marriage and families. It invented something called "the sacrament of marriage," that you could only get in church from the priest. If you didn't get it, you weren't legally married. They bundled it with other "sacraments" (baptism, confirmation, etc.) that families also could get only from the priest. In this way, couples and families were at the mercy of a religious authority that claimed to be superior to the civil authority as well.

The Protestant Reformation, and the founding of the Church of England, put a growing population of European non-Catholics in the awful position of having no way to get married legally unless they married in the Catholic Church...which they refused to do. At one point the Anglican Church woke up to the fact that perhaps 20 percent of the country's population were cohabiting and had children out of wedlock, because they had refused to have an Anglican wedding. That was what it took to get England to loosen up her stiff-necked marriage laws.

Finally, after a few centuries of misery and conflict, most Catholic and Protestant European countries had to agree with their people that there could be "civil marriage" as an option to a church ceremony. It would be available to all, regardless of what you believed. It was fully legal, non-religious and dispensed by the civil authorities. This concept was established in the U.S. as well.

It's really pathetic to see conservative Protestants trying to deny the right to marry to LGBT people -- they have obviously forgotten their own desperate battle with the Catholic Church to get the right to marry. Centuries ago, they accepted the idea of civil marriage so that they could have the religious freedom to marry as they chose.

Now, they want to have their cake and eat it too, by stuffing marriage back into the category of "sacrament," so they can claim some kind of self-appointed "religious authority" to decide the definition of marriage and exclude certain people from the right to marry.

But the fact is -- marriage has been "civil" for a number of centuries now, and its legality -- along with any and all benefits and privileges it confers -- is based 100 percent on civil authority, not on religious authority.

In a few years, I would not be surprised to see a religious-right attempt to restore church marriage as a requirement for legality. Given the trend to theocracy in this country, it would be a logical move.

Yeah. But I just don't think this will catch on quickly. I think we need to take away the rights of marriage one by one. Make hospital visitation to anyone a patient chooses, let them assign power of attorney quickly and cheaply, get rid of dynasty-creating tax breaks from married couples, etc.