1. Marriage has a huge amount of legal meaning also. The ceremony one enjoys in his/her church has emotional meaning only. It's the marriage certificate granted by the government that has meaning. In that respect, religion CANNOT claim marriage as its own. I agree this is not just a Christianity issue -- I'm talking religion in general also.

2. Most of the religious people that I've heard that have spoken out have been against Civil Unions also, but maybe they're just the vocal minority. It seems to me to be a bunch of linguistic games. Either get rid of the legal meaning of marriage in general and call them all "civil unions", or call current civil unions "marriage". Having the two confusingly similar, yet legally unequal, terms seems to me to open the doors for defining the distinction = discrimination. Why shouldn't a gay couple have 100% of the rights of my wife and me?

3. I disagree. Just because there's not an exact 1:1 correspondence between the black civil rights movement and the gay civil rights movement doesn't make the basic philosophy different. Right now gay people can't even marry eachother. So in that sense they have a huge loss of rights. From the census perspective, their relationships are not being counted AT ALL when you look at the tallies of married people. While I do agree that the level of discrimination against blacks was FAR worse than what exists against homosexuals, it's all just a matter of degrees. If I "just sorta'" discriminate against you, it's still wrong.

ms