what's in a name?

The issue of who is allowed to marry whom seems to keep rumbling round American politics - and other places too.  As far as I can tell - and I'm not hugely widely read on this - the issue in California comes down not to whether two men are allowed to tie the knot, but whether it's deemed 'marriage' or 'domestic partnership'.  Though I'm sure that matters very much to some of the people involved, it does strike me that there's a kind of law of diminishing returns setting in when you try to make a distinction.

In the UK, 'civil partnerships' carry just about all the same rights and privileges as marriages (there are some peculiarities about how they are enacted, and the permitted role of churches in those, but it looks like those will soon be resolved).  The result is that those entering civil partnerships seem invariably to call them weddings, and to use all the customary vocabulary thereafter.  That seems to make sense, and be unobjectionable: there are many official functions which are known colloquially by words other than the government term; here is another.  Conversely, if calling civil partnerships marriages would make their participants happier, then it doesn't seem as if society really has very much to lose by doing so.

Suggestions that making that equivalence undermines 'true' marriage seem quite unsustained by evidence: it's not as if people will confuse one for the other.  It's not even as if those partnerships/marriages form a significant part of the total, still less that their existence should in some way change the nature of a more traditional kind of marriage in some way.  Some will argue that whereas a civil partnership can be a matter of civil law, marriage is chiefly a religious notion.  I'd like to see the anthropological evidence for that - it seems most implausible to me.  Even from the Christian perspective, it's not as if the bible gives a thorough-going account of marriage: how one comes into being, and precisely what to do with all the unusual corner cases that arise.  It gives us instead pictures of love and mutual fidelity - and a picture of the church relating to Christ.

It seems to me - not that I'm an anthropologist either - that marriage doesn't 'belong' to the state or the church.  It is - rather self-evidently - a primitive notion that pre-dates either of those.  Marriage is what happens when two people come together - in the presence of their community - and commit themselves to each other.  Marriage is agreed in front of your friends, in front of your family, in front of the family friends who helped in your formative years.  It is cemented with prayer if prayer is important to you - and good wishes if they matter to you.  It is a time of happiness and rejoicing - because those being married are happy with each other.

There's a notion gaining popularity which says the civil union and the wedding should be separated - let the state do the first, and the church (or whatever gathered religious community you wish), if you wish, do the second.  That has a certain clarity to it, and it would surely let some politicians out of a tight spot in allowing that all and sundry can do the first, in whatever combination they wish, but that the second happens on whatever terms the church (or whatever...) chooses.   But it seems a cop-out to me.  It seems to concede that spiritual life is an optional extra, not inherent to life itself.  It seems like a retreat - as if the church wants to say to the wider society 'we have no interest in you, as long as we can keep our doctrine pure'.  It seems unwise and unhealthy.

What if history had been different.  What if we had taken Paul's words

"accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God."

seriously?  What if Christians were known  as those who brought good news to the poor; release for the oppressed; and all the rest?  I can dream.