Marriage remains a religious ritual

The argument

The position rests on a claim about what marriage is rather than about who deserves recognition. Marriage is carried out on religious grounds by religious figures: it is a rite belonging to religious traditions, conducted by their officiants according to their rules. If that is what marriage is, then the question of who is eligible for it is a question internal to those traditions, and the eligibility for marriage should therefore be guided by religious teachings rather than settled externally against them. What makes this a position on the legalisation question rather than simply a refusal of it is that it accepts the need it is responding to. Same-sex couples require legal recognition of their partnerships, meaning the protections, obligations and standing that the law attaches to a couple, and nothing in the religious character of marriage speaks to whether they should have them. Those are civil matters, and the state can confer them without reference to any doctrine. A civil union is offered as the way to do both things at once. It is one way of accommodating the legal recognition of a same-sex partnership, with the civil consequences that follow, without defying religious teachings or requiring the rite to be redefined. The couple receives what the law can give; the religious teachings are not required to say something they do not say. Neither party is asked to concede the point in dispute, because the arrangement separates the civil question from the religious one rather than deciding between them. Because marriage remains a religious ritual whose eligibility rules belong to religion, and because legal recognition does not depend on that ritual, same-sex couples should be allowed to enter civil unions.

Context

Marriage is, first and foremost, a religious ritual. Civil unions are a legal ritual. Same-sex partners will receive all the legal benefits of marriage without infringing on the religious ideology that maintains marriage is reserved for a man and a woman.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Marriages are not religious. They are both legal and expressive. In expressive terms, people wed to express their love and commitment to each other in front of witnesses. They show their love and expect society to acknowledge it. To deny gay people the right to marry is to deny them the right to express themselves in the same way. Additionally, many democracies demand a secular government. Therefore, religious arguments about marriage should not influence legislative practices or prohibit gay marriage.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Marriage is not merely a religious ritual. It is also an expressive ritual. [Rejecting P4] In secular democracies, religion should not influence the legislature.