A rose by any other name?

This is the first of what may become several posts on the New Jersey Supreme Court's decision in Lewis v. Harris.

First of all, let's be clear what happened on Wednesday. The court unanimously ruled that homosexual couples were entitled to all the rights of heterosexual couples. What they're split over is a word: marriage. New Jersey lawmakers must provide homosexual couples with equal rights, but they need not call such unions "marriages."

What?

Homosexuals are entitled to everything that heterosexuals are, save a government stamp that says "Just Married"? It offends all sense of rationality. If A is equal to C, and B is equal to C, A is not necessarily equal to B? The whole idea just boggles my mind, and it makes me want to find a dictionary to rip in half.

The decision has one other major flaw: I'm not so sure it was wrongly decided. As the court wrote, "Although courts can ensure equal treatment, they cannot guarantee social acceptance, which must come through the evolving ethos of a maturing society." Truer words were, unfortunately, never spoken. The role of the court is to make sure that all couples find equal protection under the laws. If a bunch of conservative prigs want to call homosexuals something other than "marriages," I'm not sure there's any way a court can order them to do otherwise on constitutional grounds.

This extremely bizarre ruling stems from what I have long claimed is the most problematic issue surrounding gay marriage: why is government in the marriage business at all? The people who are most in support of "traditional" marriage are often influenced, I would imagine, by religion. Indeed, marriage is an extremely, if not fundamentally, religious ceremony. Why involve government at all? If the government wants to confer certain legal rights for couples, give those rights to all couples, and call them "legal unions," or "civil unions." If two people want to be "married," let them be married in whatever secular or religious ceremony they prefer, and let them be married before the eyes of themselves, their loved ones, and whatever god in which they believe. Homosexual couple would be given all the rights they deserve, and religious conservatives would get to keep "traditional" marriage as it is, and if they are so close-minded as to not want to attend a church that marries homosexual couples, then they have every right not to do so.