DOMA and Prop 8. Both History.

[ShadowHM]

I have the answer. Return marriage to what it truly is, a religious institution. Throw out any law that references marital status. Throw out any lawsuit against any entity for refusing to perform a marriage ceremony or provide the venue and services. Problem solved, easy peasy .

Easy peasy eh?

There are, quite literally, hundreds of statutes that involve the word marriage, giving legal (secular) rights and obligations. These are, most emphatically, not mere religious precepts. They are logical legal underpinnings to support those who have made committments to each other.

We, the people, have asked for these laws. They were not made for religious reasons. They were made because they made sense for secular reasons. The overlap with religion is certainly there because the growth of large and monotheistic religions occurred at the same time as the growth of state governments.

It was of major importance to me that when my husband died, I was automatically the owner of our home and had automatic use of his assets, without waiting for probate. It was of huge importance to me and my children that when my husband lay dying in a hospital emergency unit, I was consulted on what was to happen next. The children were automatically mine to make education and other decisions about.

If you really do think it is a logical and 'easy' thing to remove the word marriage from all those statutes and substitute some other 'religiously correct' word, then you will need to spend a lot of your tax dollars on it.

Religions already get far too much of a tax break in both our countries. I don't feel like spending more tax dollars to appease their sqeamishness about a word that they do not and should not own.

As DeeBye said above, I think my country got it right.