There is a narrative embraced by all my ‘progressive’ friends and most of the true conservatives about the passage of Propositions 8 and 102 in California and Arizona and Amendment 2 in Florida. The story is that these anti-gay marriage measures were expressions of pure bigotry, that exact analogies exit with historical attempts to ban interracial marriage, and that any concerns that proponents of these measures expressed about protecting “the sanctity of marriage” were pure manure.

Elements of this narrative include the notion that redefining “marriage” the way the California supreme court did was not a threat to anyone’s religious beliefs and that the churches had no business campaigning for these measures. A nasty subtext is that the black community has a high proportion of gay bashers and the importance of the churches in the black community explains nothing about why support for these measures was disproportionately strong there.

This is a bleak account and we are fortunate that it doesn’t stand up to close examination.

Various states and countries around the world have passed civil union legislation granting gay couples the same rights as straight couples. California’s own domestic partnership law has evolved over time to the point where it effectively recognizes civil unions. This progress has come over the resistance of the gay bashers who significantly characterize civil unions as gay marriage by another name. But there is also a significant number of people who are comfortable with civil unions but oppose gay marriage.

It just doesn’t make sense to accuse people who support civil unions of wanting to discriminate against gays. The whole point of civil unions is that they grant their participants exactly the same rights as marriage. It is more reasonable to take people who are willing to accept civil unions but reject gay marriage at their word. What bothers them is a court ruling that defines marriage in a way inconsistent with their understanding of marriage as a sacrament. We don’t have to share that understanding to acknowledge that heterosexuals have the same right to believe that they have a special relationship with the Divine as Jews, Hopis or Wiccans.

The gay community and their supporters have sometimes rejected civil unions as “gay apartheid”, arguing that it analogous to the “separate but equal” treatment of blacks under Jim Crow. It’s a legitimate issue but legalizing gay marriage is the wrong remedy. The right approach is for the states to adopt civil union laws for everybody. Such laws could regulate those aspects of kinship such as survivorship, insurance benefits, child support and hospital visits that are a legitimate concern of the government and leave the sacred aspect of marriage alone.

The only objection to the concept of uniform civil unions that I could find with a brief search comes from Evan Wolfson who asks, “Why do we suddenly have to throw out the entire system, invent some whole new thing, just because gay people want to get married?” Alan Dershowitz provided one answer was by pointing out that the whole concept of the government being involved in marriage is a violation of the separation of church and state and a throwback to the time when kings were high priests. In moving to universal civil unions we can address the issues not only of gays but also of plural marriages and doubtless other issues that will arise in the future. Having the law define marriage makes no more sense than having it define baptism or specify funeral practices.

Jennifer Morse gave another part of the answer when she asserted that the conflation of marriage with the contractual aspects of civil union is itself a threat to marriage that that “has undermined more heterosexual marriages than anything, with the possible exception of adultery.” Marriage can’t be both sacred and secular. It’s ironic that in supporting Prop 8 the Catholic Church undermined the status of its own nuns who consider themselves married to Jesus.

The final and perhaps the most urgent answer to Wolfson’s question is simply that it is a faster path to equality.