Huh?

I believe he means that all that stuff you defined should be termed a "civil union" by the government that any adults can enter into.  All the stuff that is handled by the government now would still be handled by them, this just means that the stigma of marriage would be taken away from all the financial and legal aspects of it and marriage would instead be just between you, your partner, your religious comunity and your god and would have nothing to do with the government.

edit: and I want you to know that it's real hard to take you seriously with that avatar, yer just so flippin' adorable :P

Thanks for explaining.

Damn it, lol.

Just a politically uncorrect dig at Argentina's disastrous way of managing finances and also my personal persuasion that humourless, devoid of self-irony, machismo (never noticed most male tango dancers NEVER smile?) actually hides unaccepted gayness.   

I can't even say if I was waiting for such an opportunity more because of Argentine bonds or of some extremely unpleasant tangueros.   

Yeah, Torillian explained what I meant, so I'll leave it to you Slimebeast.

However, tomorrow I'm going on holiday for a week. So I'm afraid that I probably wont be able to reply to your post for a while.

-edit-

Perhaps I should explain a little more. In many places civil unions are brought in to give homosexual couples the same rights and privileges from the government as married heterosexual couples, except for a few cases where it is open to heterosexual and homosexual people. Essentially my idea would be to recognise all relationships as civil unions so that we all get the same rights and privelages, regardless of sexual orientation.

If you want to get married, you need to apply for civil union to be recognised as a couple. And then if you want to get married a religious organisation working independently from the government will recognise your relationship, but it will not have anything to with the government. The marriage will just be recognised by your church.

Give me a moment.

Where r u going. To Tenerifa?

I agree. I don't care about same sex marriage but how is the child going to call or have a mother figure when there's two dudes together?

That's exactly how it works (now) here, only that the civil union figure is called "civil marriage". Religious marriages can be performed at will, but only by previously civil married couples, and of course, it has no validity whatsoever to the gov't. I don't see where the difference is, at all

You could say the same for single parents, and yet they've been adopting children since forever, no one really seemed to care. In fact, gay couples have been doing that precisely, one of the members adopts it as a single parent and they both bring him up....of course that caused a problem since the other member wouldn't have any parental rights over the child, thus this only could be for the better since it protects both the child (assuming that his adoptive father died, he'd be rended orphan even though his other parent still lives) and the parents

Paignton. It's a small town in Devon. My friends and I have an annual trip down there about this time of year.

Yeah, it does work like that in some countries, but not all of them. It just seems like the logical way it should work though.