France legalizes gay marriage despite angry protests

[JEMC]

Jay520 said:

I have a solution to settle this madness.

Some people want "marriage" to be defined under religion only. Others think "marriage" should be free to be used by everyone. Here is the solution: we create a new term for homosexuals and nonreligious couples. That new term should be "marriage." Of course this looks and sounds like the religious "marriage" but it's actually different. It would just be a homonym, like "left" and "left" - one is the opposite of right and the other is the past tense of leave. They are spelled and pronounced the same, but have entirely different meaning.

We can reach a similar compromise with religion. The religious "marriage" will be exclusively under religious authority, while the other "marriage" will be a general term for marriage in general. No one group of people has a dictatorship over a particular arrangement of letters and syllables.

Who agrees?

I don't.

First, as others have said marriage is older than religion, so why should the term "marriage" be kept for the religious ceremonies?

Second. I don't know how it works in other contries, but here in Spain the religious ceremonies have 0 legal validity. People that go to a church to marry also have to sign the same legal documents to make it official that a couple signs when marrying on the town hall or in a court. The only difference between those couples are the religious ceremony, making it nothing more than an (expensive) extra.

So, why not leave the term  marriage as it is now, which is the common term that we use to refer people that decides to legally declare that they are together and create a new term for the religious ceremonies, even giving the option that every religion have their own term? We would have marriages (no religion), catholic marriages, jewish marriages, muslim marriages, buddhist marriages, etc.

In the end, the truth is that you can't use different names to call the same thing based on which sex the couple have because, like it or not, that is discriminatiory. It's either a marriage or not.