One giant step down for mankind!
Nothing to be proud about

“I don’t understand why the word and ceremony are so damned important.”

I think the word is important. I think the best way to explain this is the report issued by the commission to study same sex civil unions in New Jersey in February. The commission agreed with gay rights orgs that civil unions, in practice, do not offer the legal protections that marriage does. There was talk of legal complications happening with gay couples who enter into civil unions rather than civil marriage such as companies not recognizing their unions and refusing to provide health insurance to partners of their employees and so on. Civil marriage is universally accepted. So it appears to be not just a word and ceremony that is the problem, but civil unions themselves.

The aspect of these cases that I do not quite understand is why certain laws are not challenged on the basis that they are an establishment of religion. It is clear, for example, that if Maryland passed a law that made it illegal to eat meat on Fridays, the courts would have no problem striking that law down as an establishment of religion.

Well, many of the laws that enforce social mores are not much different. When you parse away all the unsupportable secular arguments for denying marriage to same-sex couples, you finally get to the nub of the issue: most states have passed these laws on the basis of religious beliefs. Texas, in a moment of (perhaps unintentional) honesty, admitted as much in the case that went to the Supremes regarding the state’s anti-sodomy law.

I see know difference between these types of laws and the Friday meat example.

The wedge issues never go away. They will not go away long past the nov. election. Let’s forget about the cost of the war, price of gasoline, loss of jobs. Ron Paul would have been proud of this.

Did you actually bother to read the California State Supreme Court’s 172-page ruling on the case?  If you had, you would have seen a well-reasoned, exhaustively documented opinion that placed this issue squarely where it belongs, in the domain of personal liberty and individual rights under the State Constitution, which has historically been quite a bit more progressive and enlightened than those of other states and even the U.S. Constitution. 

And don’t bother complaining about liberal bias, three of the four justices who found for the plaintiffs were Republican appointees who clearly take the Constitution more seriously than you do.