Nearly all government regulation of marriage is in violation of the First Amendment. Marriage is an inherently religious institution and as such it should be left to those individual institutions who is married and who is not. The government should not be allowed to pick and choose which religions get their marriages legally recognized and which religions don't.
But here you need to make a distinction between the social construct of marriage and the legal civil contract of marriage. The social construct (the ceremony) is protected by the 1st amendment. The civil contract (in my opinion) is not.
False dichotomy.
Uh, no, that's not a false dichotomy. A dichotomy is a distinction between two things that are contradictory - it's only a false dichotomy if they are not actually contradictory.
Inks is separating ceremonial marriage from contractual marriage. While you can do both at the same time, they are not inextricably linked. For example if you get a legal divorce, it might undo the marriage contract, but one's religion might not recognize that as valid and therefore the ceremonial marriage would still stand to the religious organization even though it wouldn't have any legal bearing.
I'm well aware of what Inks was getting at. I'm also aware that, as always, it is a false dichotomy - if marriage is "purely" a religious institution (as most of our resident homophobes argue), then there is, quite simply, no civil component to it. Therefore the only reasonable course of action is that the State immediately ceases its involvement in the affair and turns marriages over to the religious institutions from which they supposedly spring -- including institutions, like the Quakers, which are more than happy to perform gay marriages.
^^^^^^^^^^^
The last response here is what I was trying to get at in my original post. The so-called "sanctity of marriage" argument implies that marriage is a religious institution which, if it is, then the government has no right to deny people marriage licenses if their union is recognized by their religion.
