Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

The best argument is: that's the way we do it in the US. We've never waited for complete agreement among the states before acting on the Federal level, regardless of whether it is a Constitutional Amendment or a SCOTUS decision.

This article shows the number of states that have reached consensus on Women's Suffrage, Interracial Marriage, Prohibition and a few other issues. Same-sex marriage has actually had more consensus than many of those other issues did before SCOTUS jumped in.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-pace-of-social-change...

I used to think this was a good approach to take, to just eliminate marriage, but I eventually changed my mind, and here's why: This isn't a matter of state and religion it's a matter of state and CULTURE. You need to take it into consideration with the idea of kinship bonds as a whole.

Take for example the kinship role of fatherhood. This is something the state is rightly committed to taking a stance on, and there's a branch of law (family) to deal with rights, obligations, etc around this kinship bond.

What is a father? Is it a biological father who has not given up his rights? Is it a biological father who has no custody rights? Is it a biological father who has terminated all rights? IS it a non-biological father who has adopted? Is it a step-father who has a different name and doesn't have custodial rights but has been called daddy as long as the child can remember? Is it the man who's name is on the birth certificate but whose dna proves it's not his?

Or should we abandon the word father all together and say "civil custodial guardian." instead to try and separate culture from the state?

The separation of culture from state signifies what you hear all the time on fox news: a culture war. There was a culture war around civil rights 50 years ago too, and now nobody thinks twice about it. Eventually the same will be true around gay rights. The idea that you have to step around terms like wife, husband, or marriage - because they get folks riled up would be like stepping around "father" because it might get some folks riled up - it just doesn't happen to as much right now.

One could argue that marriage is an affinity kinship bond, not a descent kinship bond - and thus fundamentally different than parenthood. But that's a biological distinction - not really a civil distinction given all the tremendous amount of legal work that has gone into removing and assigning parental rights for both biological and non biological children.

Marriage isn't a dirty word, it's not a religious word, it's a cultural word that describes an incredibly important affinity kinship bond. A society with plural cultures does not require that we rename everything under sterile newspeak words.

Even though Scalia probably agrees with your unspoken rule, he doesn't reach the same conclusion because of it:

(Scalia, I): "...Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers, who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans19), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation..."

You aren't even wrong.

Just my 2 cents.

The government should not enforce marriage contracts, they should enforce legal contracts. Marriage is a private matter, not a government matter.

They shouldn't officially recognize marriage at all, nor should they discriminate on marital status for tax purposes. All people should be equal in the eyes of the law.

People should be free to enter into legal contracts with whomever they want.