A Radical Solution to the Gay Marriage Issue: End State Sponsoring of Religious Ceremonies

An article at Time.com discusses an idea put forth in the San Francisco Chronicle by two Pepperdine law professors, who

issued a call to re-examine the role the government plays in marriage. The authors ... 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.

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 people who feel 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 wanted. Religions would lose nothing of their role in sanctioning the kinds of unions that they find in keeping with their tenets. And for nonbelievers and those who find the word marriage 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.

The idea does not seem that pragmatically realizable, although the Time magazine writer reports that the authors apparently think it is. Indeed, they hope it will "short-circuit" the need for another referendum.

Their proposal is aimed at helping speed a resolution on the issue in other states — gay marriage is heating up in Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont and elsewhere — and at the federal level.

Even if it's not likely that we establish a separation of church and state in regards to marriage, the idea gets at a central point and effectively gives "equal protection." Any couple could be recognized as a domestic partner by the state and then additionally recognized as married by a religious organization or not. The two would be separate.

But it is not likely to make defenders of Prop. 8 happy.

For ... the folks who feel most strongly about marriage and most passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage — the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They are against not just gay marriage but also gay couples — and especially against government sanctioning of those relationships, no matter what they are called.

What do you think?