CIVIL UNIONS: WOULD A MARRIAGE BY ANY OTHER NAME BE THE SAME?: From Christianity Today

...If through civil unions (as endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry) gay couples can obtain the benefits of marriage, what difference does the word marriage make?

Quite a bit, say a number of Christian leaders who support civil unions but oppose same-sex marriage. They see civil unions as a means of economic justice--but not just for homosexuals. In fact, they would rather see such legislation avoid mention of sexuality altogether.

"It may well be that for the sake of public justice we need to recognize different kinds of households, but I would never start that by primary reference to so-called gay households." said Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University. "[Civil unions] could include things like single people looking after aging parents. It could include, as in my own family, two bachelor brothers and a sister who ran a farm their whole life." Defined this way, she says, civil unions would actually preserve the uniqueness of marriage. ...

But Skillen, Mouw, Van Leeuwen, and others are part of a small minority: evangelicals who oppose gay marriage but support some form of civil union legislation. The Pew poll found that 20 percent of white evangelical Protestants agree to "allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements with each other that would give them many of the same rights as married couples." That's only an 8-percentage point difference from those who supported gay marriage. Three quarters of white evangelicals polled opposed such benefits.

Likewise, several Christian political advocacy organizations have formed a network called the Arlington Group to press for a federal marriage amendment specifically banning such legislation.

Mouw says he has "more sympathy" for such efforts than he did in 1999, when he moderated a Christianity Today roundtable discussion of the pros and cons of civil unions. "It just looks like anything that we do that concedes something in this direction will simply be used as a stepping stone to push us even further in the direction that we don't want to go," he said.

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posted by Eve at 12:57 PM | link

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