It was disappointing and embarrassing today watching C-SPAN pull up file footage of Barack Obama saying he believes that marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman. I cringed.

I'm hoping in my heart that this is one of those situations where someone ran the poll numbers and told him he simply couldn't get elected if he didn't say something like that going in.

I'm not going to change my vote based on this because, first, it's not like McCain has a better posture, and second of all, I think no matter how sadly this whole issue ends up playing out, it's not as important as Climate Change. I'm less sure how it ranks against the fiscal crisis, but maybe that's more important, too. If we don't make sure there's going to be a habitable planet and a viable country still operating on it, the question of who has marriage rights seems to me, regretfully, minor. That's not a statement about the lack of importance to me of this gay marriage issue, but rather a statement of how overridingly important those other issues seem to me.

Once those issues of survival are dealt with, the gay marriage issue needs to be addressed. Leonce Gaiter, in a blog yesterday, wrote a very nice explanation of the inequity. His use of the “separate but equal” metaphor really hit home. It's a worthy read.

Beyond that, though, I had always understood Republican values to emphasize small, non-invasive government with an emphasis on individual liberty and personal responsibility. And yet, the intense focus on same-sex marriage complicates government, needlessly invades privacy, uselessly limits liberty and counterproductively makes it more difficult for people to take on family responsibilities.

Society has a strong reason to be wanting to enable marriages among gays. When people get sick or run into financial trouble, they need other people to help them out or take care of them. And society has a strong interest in making sure that the family unit responsible for taking care of a child remains intact. The church may have other reasons for liking marriage, but the thing civil society stands to gain from marriage is not the religious aspect, it's the financial help of having family ready to take care of someone. We should be encouraging people to live in family units in whatever way we can because family units are more resilient than scattered individuals trying to get by on their own.

I can't help feeling it probably comes partly down to the fact that some people are repulsed by the thought of gay people having sex. And maybe indeed the thought of homosexual sex doesn't appeal to a lot of us. But after all, if we're honest, I bet most of us would admit that there are plenty of heterosexual sex encounters that most of us would rather not think about. And yet no one is seriously seeking to keep those people from marrying. In fact, we're mostly happy when they do, sometimes because they're our friends and sometimes because it just makes us less worried as a society that those people will have no one to take care of them when they get sick or grow old. And why should it be any different for gays?

Same-sex marriage is certainly ok in some churches, so if we're catering as a public to the whims of certain churches over others, then by my reading it doesn't work under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It's not the government's business to decide who's right, it's the government's business to stay out of a religious matter.

Basically, if the religious folks among us want to offer up the terminology of “marriage” as something we should use in writing laws, then it must be something accessible to all and changeable without permission of any church. If the word isn't usable without religious strings attached, it cannot reasonably be a word that forms the definitional foundation of our public policy.

If marriage is an exclusive thing that some of our citizens are entitled to and some not, then let's separate church from state and rewrite every public law that mentions marriage to instead refer to civil union. Let's have a civil union tax deduction. Let's have people who live in civil unions be the ones who can visit at hospitals or have special inheritance tax preference.

What better defense of marriage could there be than to put it out of reach of government? From that day forth, there would be no way to claim any ongoing assault on marriage by the government. Forget leaving it to the states, let's leave it out of politics altogether, and leave it just to the church, where it is safe.

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