Homosexual marriage

[Count Comfect]

Originally Posted by brownjenkins

Actually, it isn't. Marriage is a social contract. It wasn't in the "civil" realm for a large part of human history.

But it is now. I don't really care if Tutankhamen, Aristotle, Hiawatha, or anyone else in the past considered marriage to be the business of the state, the church, both, or neither. Right now, marriage is legally a civil contract with its rights and responsibilities defined by the civil state, and that's what I mean by marriage. As Nurv (who I seem to pretty much completely agree with) says, there is confusion caused by the fact that what happens in a church is also referred to as marriage - but since, except if the church official involved is (as they usually are) designated by the State to also officiate civil marriage, that doesn't bring the legal advantages that the civil ceremony does, that's not what any issue of legal homosexual marriage is referring to.