Excuse me for being dense but, what is the difference between a civil union and marriage from the government's point of view?

For the record, the wording of the statement is surprisingly close to the wording of most gay rights group.
"equal rights under the law" is dog-whistle politics. It means "I am happy too but I really can't say it".
I thought he would not even go there. All in all, it is a pretty intelligent and artful way to put what is ultimately a cowardly but politically necessary position.

McCain just demonstrated his ignorance.
The decision was the response to a suit. The judges did their job.

Obama... I know why i don't support him. Where is the change for the LGBT community in Obama's presidency?

“I’m a Christian, and so although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman,” Obama said.

What does McCain think of state legislators making these decisions? The California legislature has twice passed laws to make gay marriage legal but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed them.

"In his veto message, the Republican governor said it is up to the state Supreme Court and then, if necessary, voters to alter Proposition 22, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman in California."

By the way - I really believe that gay marriage is going to be a giant non-issue in this election. People do not care - except for the 25% of the population who are batshit insane fundies.

And they wouldn't vote for Obama regardless.

I love it that he is for Equal Protection under the law.

No link, but I recall seeing one in a dKos diary in the past few months wherein Obama made the distinction between Civil Union and marriage a purely religious one. Feeling that, for the state to allow same sex "marriage" per se is, to his Constitutional interpretation, a violation of church-state seperation. He does, as clearly stated in this article, believe that all couples should have equal rights under the law.

Does that mean that all references to "marriage" in the legal domain should be changed to be "civil union" even for male/female unions and leave marriage strictly to the religious domain?? Dunno myself, just wondering.

Well gay marriage is a touchy issue for more reasons than simply the wingnuts. There is the issue of Freedom of/from Religion. The constitution bars government from interfering with religious practices, and marriage is a religious practice.

Sadly, due to tax law, insurance and inheritance law etc, it has become entangled with government, so in actual fact the government has MADE marriage into an equal rights issue. Because they just had to legislate marital status.

The only way out is basically to completely disentangle the legislative aspect of two people deciding to move in together and share property, and possibly reproduce/adopt, and the ceremonial religious aspect.

The constitution bars government from interfering with religious practices, and marriage is a religious practice.

Please listen - you have it exactly backwards. Marriage is first and foremost and nothing more than a governmentally sanctioned union. The Church usurped it from the king/state in part - not the other way around. It is a governmental function, end of story - that's all it is.

Of course Obama is a bit out of step with the left... He's running a general election campaign. He can't be the Progressive Liberal Messiah many want him to be, because he wouldn't get elected.

I would like legalized gay marriage, believe me. I would like a lot of changes in the way of personal freedoms, peace and global leadership. You must understand however, that right now, in this country, we are a couple steps away from real, institutionalized fascism.

Once he's in, the rhetoric may change. Maybe once he's in his second term, the rhetoric will change. Progressives really have to learn patience and strategy. We have the activism and expression of outrage down pat. Now it's time to get Zen Voodoo up in the house and see Obama's support of civil unions as a BIG plus.

Personally, I wouldn't care if they called legal same-sex unions "French vanilla ice cream" so long as they carried the same legal benefits and burdens as opposite-sex unions. But what the court was specifically saying is, it's NOT ok under the California constitution to call them by a different term, for the precise reason that it delineates a difference between the two, and that delineation could lead to inequality under the law.

The easiest and least politically explosive way to comply with the court's findings and extend the same legal rights to all couples, then, would probably be for the state to re-define ALL legally recorded domestic partnerships as "civil unions". People getting hitched in a church ceremony, which essentially is superfluous to the legal recording of the union, would be "married" and in common parlance, people who haven't gone through the religious ceremony would still be referred to as "married".

Semantics shouldn't matter, but they almost always do.

Exactly GL - It disgusts me when people not as equal as us demand equal rights. Show me where in the constitution they guarantee that? And don't rub some cool aid into the page to try to blur the words (ha!)

With the economy in ruins, with our sons and daughters dying overseas in a stupid illegal war - do you really believe gay marriage will be a wedge issue? Really?

Well, that's been the Republicans' game for a long time now. They get social conservatives to commit to vote Republican against their economic interests just because the GOP is on their side with Guns, God, Abortion, and Gays. I'd like to think we're getting to the point where the larger issues of the economy and war are so salient that they can't be drowned out by the wedge issues though.

Right, Obama is one step behind the California supreme court decision.

John McCain is an idiot. The judges didn't overrule or force anything on to the people.

As usual, the lazy critics are uninformed. The California court has not over-ruled the legislature: in fact, the legislature has voted for full marriage equality twice already. And the court has not "created" a right to marriage for gay couples. It has argued that if the state has conceded that domestic partners should have, under state law, all the benefits and responsibilities of married couples, the designation of a separate and distinct category must be suspect, under strict scrutiny, to the inference that the designation is based on a desire to deny gay couples equal dignity and recognition.

Hillary: .........

Oh yeah, she is just going to ignore it because making a statement about the G word might be politically risky. Maybe she's checking her her pollster, running a few pushcalls testing the waters, you know, the usual.

Or maybe she is on the phone with McCain coordinating their next joint attack.

And really the best way to look at the same sex marriage issue, AFAIC, is to look back at the miscegenation laws and their downfalls.

I predict eventually the law will have to deal with same-sex couples as "married" anyway.

The first time a gay couple with one working partner, the other stay-at-home, breaks up (with children), then the state will give child-support to the other partner.

Just like Texas has a "common-law" marriage, I can't see gay couples escaping marriage for long.

All marriages should be extra-legal. Government should have shit to do with any and all gods and any and all gods should fuck-off and have shit to do with governments.

The government has a duty to register/license/regulate all civil unions as they impact folk directly involved in them and society in general. This is about health, welfare and interstate commerce.

If folk want to sancify their civl unions and binding legal understandings with a religious oriented ceremony and the religious oriented institution they choose to be involved with chooses to play host for the event . . . who am I and who is anybody else to screw with that.

While the woman I love and myself bound ourselves under the laws of California and the people of California can argue interest in the maintenance of that union . . . The fact that we also bound ourselves under the laws of Moses and the Jewish people is none of their business (except for the Lieberman (No, not that one) Clause in my wife's and my Ketubah).

Additionally, while I would perfer that Obama would adopt a view on this subject (and healthcare and corporate legislation) that is more in line with my point of view, I recognize his right (and the right of those to the right of my views) to his understanding of the universe . . . although I will not feign happiness about it.

I give props to Obama for addressing this subject AND for pointing out that Bush43 and McCain are jack_holes for and about Bush43's K'nesset address.

Dood,

If you were a "wingnut conservative Christian," chances are you wouldn't know the meaning of "nuanced."

Broad, sweeping generalization, I know.

But damned accurate.

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Obama/Olbermann '08!

Oh, yeah. And the war. Which is related to the economy, but a booger-bear of an issue in and of itself.

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Obama/Olbermann '08!

I believe that civil unions should be the law of the land while the term marriage should be defined as unions established by a church.

I don't like the fact that the state and federal governments can consider marriage a sacred institution while at the same time treating it like a two-party contract with its own branch of secular law.

I think this debate has been confused from the start. If a church, such as the Unitarian Universalists, wish to recognize gay unions, then that is their right. They can marry under that church and it is a sacred institution per that branch of religion. The state and federal government, however, would treat it as a civil union for purposes of the law, i.e. health insurance, taxes, inheritance, and children.

So if the Catholic Church never wants to recognize same-sex marriage, they can continue to refuse because that is their right as a religion-- a gay couple can choose to marry under a church or go see the justice of the peace.

This balances out separation of church and state and gives the choice to religious institutions to participate in the secular world or stick to their false moral high ground.

Redefine legal marriage as a civil union for all citizens and quit with the second class Jim Crow definitions of marriage... one for breeders and one for gays. Leave marriage where it belongs: church.

Clinton and Obama, like most leading Democrats, are trying to have it both ways, proclaiming a devotion to equal marriage rights, and then declaring their opposition to giving the institution in question the same name for both gay and straight couples.

As the California Supreme Court says, unless the state provides civil unions for all or marriages for all, the rights are not equal.

And leaving it up to the states--as Obama, Clinton...and Dick Cheney support--inherently denies equal marriage rights, and not only because it fails to give gay marriages the full faith and credit enjoyed by straight marriages.

Let's see how the Clinton/Obama/Cheney position on equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians would sound if applied to the issue of race and Jim Crow: "I'm in favor of equal access to public accommodations for people of all races, but it should be a state decision." That was essentially Barry Goldwater's reason for opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In short, Clinton and Obama are quite simply not in favor of equal marriage rights, despite their desire to package their opposition to them in a favorable light.

So has Obama called any male reporters "sweetie"?

Obama is specifically against same-sex marriage, as is Clinton. Both support civil unions. McCain wants no legal recognition for gay couples, neither same-sex marriage nor civil unions. All three candidates are opposed to a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage nation-wide. If McCain decides to support the effort in California to enact such a State constitutional amendment, he will put himself at odds with Schwarzenegger. McCain needs to hold on to his social Neanderthals, but he also needs to attract Democrats who are disenchanted with Obama. Getting too deeply into the gay issue has dangers for him. It is possible the candidates will strike a balance by continuing to say that they oppose gay marriage but support the right of States to decide.

An interesting note about the effort in California to place a constitutional amendment referendum on the November ballot: It is widely assumed that if it passed, the amendment would overturn yesterday's court ruling that struck down the impediments to gay marriage. But some legal analysts said that part of yesterday's ruling specifically made the right to marriage for all California citizens a constitutionally protected right for the first time. Therefore if the amendment measure passes in November it could then be ruled unconstitutional by the court on the grounds that it would conflict with the constitutionally protected right of all citizens to marry. We'll probably hear a lot more about this later as yesterday's lengthly ruling is examined.

California, typically a trend-setting state with a population larger than all of Canada, has joined Massachusetts in leaving all the candidates behind by embracing true equality for gay citizens on the state level, not half-way civil union measures. On the national level America is behind a growing number of nations that treat their gay citizens as equals.

The NY Times has an interesting look at how much this issue may or may not resonate in the campaign.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24657876