Civil Unions

In Australia we like to offer a commited couple, who are determined to be the same sex, a thing called "civil unions". It's like marriage but you can't call it marriage because you're gay, so when you propose to your partner you ask "hey would you like to civilly unite with me winky face winky face".

It really grinds the gears of some Christians, and I'm being unfair in singling out Christians but I go to a Christian church so that's the view I'm exposed to. "God created man and woman to unite in one flesh, through marriage and through sex, they complement each other". What follows then is that a man and a man or a woman and a woman cannot complement each other, therefore they can't really marry.

And I can't argue against that in the biblical sense, because the Bible literally says that and I can't be all "well if you squint your eyes really hard the text stops making sense". It becomes problematic, however, when we use marriage to mean MORE than the union between man and woman. You see in modern society, we use marital status to determine things like:
-who gets your money if you die
-who looks after your children if you die
-who makes medical decisions for you when you're about to die
-and probably a few other things not related to dying or imminently dying, I just can't think of any other examples right now.

It doesn't make much sense to use a religious defintion of marriage to define union in our largely secular society. Keep the spiritual things spiritual and keep the practical things practical. I also get the feeling that the Christians would be placated as long as "marriage" wasn't labelled "marriage", and thus the "civil union" business.

But why does it matter, right? What's in a word, if "civil union" confers the same rights? Well my counterargument is that we should really be labelling it as "Christian union" vs "marriage", or maybe "spiritual unity between man and woman", SUBMAW for short.

"My dear Eliza, will you SUBMAW me?"

Why do Christians own the word "marriage", anyway? Just because it was so translated that way- maybe they can stick to the ancient Hebrew word and we can have "marriage" as it's made its way to common English.

People seem to get upset that we make such a huge commotion over "semantics", as "words are just words". Well you see, when you use words to communicate, words confer meaning, and when you use such things to mean "you are inherently below me/worth less than me", people get angry! If people could choose to be straight they probably would, but the choice is kind of made for them. And no, marrying the opposite sex doesn't make things all-good again, because you can't offer yourself to someone you're not attracted to, so you won't achieve that nice spiritual union thing you were aiming ofr in the first place.

Thus concludes my post-church rant. This "Christianity" thing is NOT going well for me ):