While marriage equality is a worthy goal, it’s an uphill battle due to the perception a lot of people have about what marriage is. Unfortunately, a person’s perception is their reality. To atheists (and a lot of other people to) it’s a legal contract that brings certain rights and responsibilities. To a Mormon it’s an eternal bond for the sake of creating a family, for Catholics it’s one of their eight sacraments, and for many conservative Christians (including Mormons and Catholics) it’s all about making babies.

The whole marriage is about family argument fails on two counts. First is that there are a lot of children in need of adoption and same sex couples can provide them with very happy and loving homes and same sex couples also have the option of sperm donation or surrogacy. Next is that conservative religious groups who campaign against same sex marriage aren’t also campaigning to require fertility tests for opposite sex couples or making them vow that they will have children.

I used to be in favor of simply eliminating marriage from the legal books, thus removing the religious baggage that the “M” word has for a lot of people and making equality to enter into what ever kind of legal union replaces it more attainable. I’ve recently changed my mind on that. Conservatives claim that we are trying to destroy marriage. If we were to actually remove marriage from the books they would be right, well, kind of.

Since changing the language to get away from the battle would probably be an even harder fight, we have to continue working to get rational religious people (yes, they do exist) to recognize that while they can hold what ever beliefs they want about marriage or family, they have no right to impose their beliefs on anyone else by force of law. If they’re willing to let elderly couples get married, then they can’t argue it’s about making babies, if they’re willing to let opposite sex non-Christian couples (Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc) get married then it’s not a religious dogma, and if they want marriage to continue to have legal recognition then they need to view the base definition as lowest common denominator, and when you’re just looking at a legal contract between two people there’s no good reason to exclude people consenting adults from being able to enter it.