Reply #121: It would be far more difficult [View All]

[Ms. Toad]

to get a constitutional amendment for civil unions than to just require that states respect marriages performed in other states and countries. Once that happens, any individual state ban on creating its own marriages will be meaningless since couples can cross the border to a state which permits creating marriages, get married, and return home and claim all the rights associated with marriage.

Are you old enough to remember the miserable failed attempt to constitutionally declare that women are equal to men? Unfortunately, we are far more likely to get an opposite amendment (barring recognition of marriage) than we are to get one permitting any type of legal union. Creating a constitutional amendment is, at its core, adopted by popular vote (the bodies voting are different than what just happened in CA, but it is a vote nonetheless).

Unfortunately, when you change what you call something which already has an established legal meaning, you have to start over from scratch. From a legal perspective, your assertion that "Marriage is a word that's meaning is muddled" is not correct. It has a well established meaning within each state and country (and well defined relationships with that stats in other states and countries). When you give it a new name, the legal presumption is that you intend it to be different - and you have to start all over unmuddling the meaning of the new term. That will include decades of litigation - all at the expense of individual families - to refine "Elmo" to the point where its meaning and the legal implications are as clear as they are - from a legal perspective - with marriage today.