BTW government marriages were first created in Europe during the reins of the Royal families as a way to control property and inheritances….had nothing to do with religion or love for that matter, but it was a legal contract.

Such legislation would be akin to legislating baptism over sprinkling, or circumcision, or who was qualified to preach. These are all religious rites which do not belong in legislation.

Mr. Harker: I think you’ll notice that whichever God you chose to worship doesn’t go around condemning people to “burn in Hell” a whole lot. You might want to think about that before you do…

No, I wouldn’t. That would be a silly, pointless gesture, with no significant effect on anything that mattered.

You seem to be claiming that by not travelling out-of-state to get married (when my home state was willing to do it locally), I’d be implicitly offering some kind of support for my home state’s policies. I don’t think that is the case; and even if there were some implicit statement involved, it would be so attenuated as to be practically worthless. The home state’s marriage license department doesn’t keep a statistic of “number of people who were eligible to marry here but went somewhere else because our discriminatory policies (not against them) made that a moral imperetive”. They would have no way of knowing that number even if they cared about it. Things might be different if marriage licenses were a significant source of revenue for states – but they aren’t.

The morally right thing to do would be get married locally and use your *vote*, and other normal resources of democratic change possibly backed up by the money you’d otherwise have been willing to spend on the meaningless travel, to work on changing the home state’s policy – or, if the home state’s policy is so deeply immoral as to make that course of action intolerable (I don’t think restrictions on other people getting married would fall into that category for me, though combined with other discrimination they might), then leave permanently.

That said: I might well consider not getting married *at all*, if I thought that the institution had been turned into something I didn’t want to be part of…

Imagine too, when you invite diverse family backgrounds to the wedding and explain why you are driving/flying X kilometers (“miles” in america I suppose) away instead of gathering locally. It’s quite a statement to your social circle.

Makes me want to have a re-wedding with my current spouse. 🙂

Interesting idea. Thank you.

I was thinking about how archaic some of the united states is in regards to same-sex marriage. And then I get things into perspective — forget legalizing marriage… as far as I know, if I have homosexual sex where I live I can face a prison term of up to 5 years. As well, I may be fined up to several hundred US dollars. This is probably not completely accurate as I am an expatriate – it’s more likely that I would be heavily “fined” and then extradited. But still, things are much worse elsewhere compared to the united states.