I'm confused about the American Republican party

[Taelas]

I rearranged to better explain.

Your first point about marriage being solely a religious sacrament is contentious. There are lots of married people around the world that are not religious.

In Western Civilization, the "institution of Marriage" has been pretty much inexorabily linked to the Church (Catholic, and then also Protestants) for some hundreds of years (since the 1300's). But, yes, a form of marriage exists in almost every culture. I particularly like the one where "sharing a meal and a bed" means you are married. So, anyway, we are in a culture of laws, morals and ethics based on English common law, which is based on a Judeo-Christian framework. What are the 7 sacrements of the Catholic Church? Marriage is one of them. In Judaism, marriage is viewed as a contractual bond commanded by God in which a man and a woman come together to create a relationship in which God is directly involved.

As the government seeks to move toward secularism I think we need to critically examine the whole, rather than specific parts. There is a social legal contract in which the State takes interest (health care for dependents, tax law, hospital visits, inheritance, guardianship of minor children, etc. ), but this is not the same as the sacred holy sacrament of the Catholic or Jewish faiths. People want to call them the same, but they are not the same.

Marriage as a concept goes beyond religion. While it is often associated with it, it is not limited to it.

If religious institutions want a word that is unique to their particular brand of social union, they need to call it something other than marriage. Subverting the word--and thereby denying it to people of no religious affiliation--is practically theft.

If they don't want to do that, they need to accept that marriage is not limited to religious unions.