I've thought that this would be a good solution for a long time. From the government's perspective, a marriage is a legal property agreement. It is recorded and registered to indicate shared property rights and survivorship and inheritance guidelines. The genders of the two parties are irrelevant.

Let the government issue civil union certificates. Let the churches conduct marriage ceremonies since for many of them it is a sacrament.

McKenna, wrong on major issues like health care, is right in this case. What we have now could easily be called socialized marriage, where the government arbitrarily imposes a single kind of marriage on everyone in spite of other choices which others might want to make. An increasing number of bad marriage laws to cover every alternative to het mono marriage is no way to go. The best solution is to leave marriage to those who want to be in it. They could feel free to seek the blessing of the religion of their choice or not.

This should also mean an end to the thousand or so special privileges for couples. This very flawed system, which won't be able to stand up for long in the face of the majority of the public living in unmarried households. In it's place, we need a system of personal rights which apply to all individuals regardless of who they are living with.

I'm sure even staunch atheists would agree that marriage is properly considered a sacrament. The Constitution makes it clear that the government should not make laws about religion. I say this includes laws about marriage. Perhaps the first person to advocate for the separation of church and state was Jesus. He directed his followers to render unto the government what was the government's and unto the Lord what was the Lord's. This means that the Chicken Little Republicans who invoke Christianity as the reason to make laws about a sacrament are blasphemers.

So whether you are a religious person or not, Mckenna is right: The government should butt out of regulating marriage.

And this is the elemental part of the debate that the popular press insists on glossing over. "Marriage" is a term that has a definite and well-accepted meaning amongst a vast majority of the world population. This issue can't be resolved by playing with words, although that is a tactic that government frequently attempts. If gay activists would just accept civil unions and declare victory everyone could go home and get on with their lives. Instead, many posit a definition of "marriage" that means virtually any two people living together (and who because of that fact want more stuff from employers and government) and then carp about how they are being denied a natural right. Most voters turn away from that argument scratching their heads. I'd like to hear more from McKenna on this, although I must admit that thoughtful discussions on subjects like that are few and far between; and really, the civil union issue is on a glide path to being settled law. It's only the word games that remain. Maybe McKenna is afraid of this discussion overshadowing the important issues facing this state. Declare victory and move on.

dbreneman, it is undeniable that employers and government give you more stuff if you are married. Therefore it is deeply unfair to expect gays to just accept civil unions and get on with their lives.

Perhaps we should back up the question a step further: why should employers and government give people more or less stuff depending on their personal living arrangements?

Logical question, spock, and that's one of the reasons why a discussion is so desirable. Marriage benefits were based on the assumption that a married couple consisted of a breadwinner husband and a homemaker wife. Today that's the exception, not the rule.

If your quote is correct and he said "...a good argument can be made..." then your piece is built on a strained interpretation. I believe good arguments can be made for things I oppose. The phrase means what it says; there are rational, coherent people who disagree with me.

I'm disappointed to hear that McKenna resorts to the "gay marriage threatens our children" bogeyman. I agree that he's a very smart man so I assume he knows this is nonsense. As a couples therapist I see how marriage can be threatened above all by the way partners treat each other, and secondarily by trauma, by family conflicts, by financial stress, by poor health and stress about how to deal with it, and by chronic shortages of sleep, exercise, relaxation, or simply time together. I have never seen a couple whose marriage was on the rocks because their lesbian neighbors were happy.

I know that rapid cultural change is unsettling, and it should raise questions, but there's a big difference between reasonably questioning, and promoting an irrational projection as a way of pandering to voters' fears.

Ron is beholden to the base Republicans. He can't condone "Gay Marriage" and thus even if he'd want to, he can't sign such a bill.

"Marriage" should be a function of religion. Co-filing of taxes, co-responsibility for raising children, co-sharing of finances/inheritance is a function of the state and yet unwinding all the special case laws we have is going to take some time. But ideally, if you are supporting someone else for more than 50% of the cost, it should just be a single deduction on your Federal taxes no matter what their age. Otherwise everyone files a single form. The problem of social security benefits in the event that the primary person paying the tax will need a lot more thought. But it's not an unsolvable problem.

Friedes, not Freites.

In many European countries, such as Germany, people get married twice: once legally, usually before a notary, and if desired once religiously in a church. People who want religious weddings still have to get legally married, often the day before the big religious wedding. This is all McKenna is proposing, and it's a terrific example of separation of church and state that the Europeans actually do better than Americans.

@dbreneman: You seem to be among those who persist in the idea that "separate but equal" is valid. Civil unions are not the same as marriage, evidenced by the different terms, therefore there is not equality between them, and therefore no one can "go home."

The word "marriage" most certainly does not have a definite and well-accepted meaning throughout the world. Indeed, the English word itself comes originally from Latin maritare "to be given to a man" (the root mar- meaning "man"), back from the time not so long ago that girls were chattel and married off in exchange for dowries as a financial or political transaction. The German word for marriage is "Ehe," which comes from an old Germanic root "ewa" meaning simply "law." In German, the word marriage originally meant first and foremost a legal transaction, not a religious one. I could go on with other languages to demonstrate my point. Incidentally as well, same-sex marriages are attested in history in documents going back as far as the Roman Empire and Zhou Dynasty, and in the ninth century same-sex marriages were performed occasionally in Spain.

People simply need to accept that all words change meaning over time, and "marriage" no longer means "(a woman) given to a man." Now it is also changing meaning to to refer to adults being legally joined and committed to each other in love, whether of different sexes or the same sex. Once people accept this, *then* we can go home.

Raising my hand for smacgry's comments -- "In many European countries, such as Germany, people get married twice: once legally, usually before a notary, and if desired once religiously in a church. People who want religious weddings still have to get legally married, often the day before the big religious wedding."

Several years ago some friends (Americans) decided they wanted to get married in Paris, at the church of St Eustache, and learned that they would have to be married in a civil ceremony as well if they wanted to be married legally. The distinction between the two ceremonies made perfect sense to me, and is perhaps a solution to our current national quandry. Instead of using religious professionals to do state business, perhaps we should continue with the separation of church and state.

Just to remind every one, all ANYONE needs to perform a wedding is the state license. You need no other certification. The form does ask if the service is a religious one. And the person who is officient is charged with seeing that the forms are delivered to the county auditer who issued the license.

I agree that marriage needs to have both the civil and the religious components separated. Why not the civil wedding one day and the religious ceremony another day? Then you get to have TWO parties. This is one place where the Europeans do it so much more sensibly than Americans!

I may seem that way to you, but I am no such thing. Students are students, and their race is irrelevant. If you say that all students are getting educated, and therefore it doesn't matter whether it's in a good school or a poor one, you're being hypocritical. However same-sex couples are different from heterosexual couples in more than just the complexion of their skin. There's nothing bigoted in suggesting that differences of type might inspire differences of solution.

But you do get extra credit for the condescending suggestion that since I support civil unions, I must be a racist. Quite inventive.

First, a correction of fact... Unitarian Universalists (the oldest Christian-based religion in the country) have been conducting marriage ceremonies for same-gender couples for nearly 20 years and have long been irked by the media's assertion that same-gender marriage is opposed by all religions.

As for McKenna... being smart isn't the same as being wise.