Dr Adequate writes:
The government should recognize legal contracts --- which they can, to save the feelings of the butthurt, call something else, such as "union".
The problem is that we have a lot of laws with the word "marriage" in them. Changing the name of government-sanctioned contracts to "union" would require rewording a lot of laws.
Which is why I suggest that
only the government-sanctioned marriages should be recognized as legal marriages. If churches want to call something "marriage", that's fine but it should have no legal standing whatsoever.
Dr Adequate writes:
The problem here is that the government is being asked to decide that some religious ceremonies are legal and some are not.
The solution to that problem, in my opinion, is for the government to handle the legal and for religion to handle the religious. No religious ceremony needs to be illegal if it carries no legal weight in the first place.