I absolutely agree that the government backing out of the marriage business is really unlikely at this point. On top of the bureaucratic obstacles you mention, there’s clear momentum in the opposite direction. When faced with a situation of civil inequality, it’s a lot easier to give the have-nots the same rights as the haves than it is to sit back and say “Hmmm, should we rethink the underlying concepts that we’ve been relying on for social continuance for the last several centuries and come up with a new system from scratch?”

To make a programming analogy, it’s a lot faster to hack new code on top of old crufty code than is to rework systems from scratch, particularly since setting up a system has the huge latency of adjusting and working out all the bugs of the new implementation. Ok. Done with my super geeky aside.

I’m not sure how secure the actual precedent for three-parent adoptions is. When [roommate 1] was pregnant with [small child], they were advised by a lawyer that there was some precedent, but that the best way to follow it would be to give initial custody to the biological parents (including the sperm donor) until the child was old enough that the non-biological parents could establish a history of relationships with the child. In the case of actual married parents, though, children can only legally have two parents–when a step-parent adopts a child, the biological parent looses all rights. And now that homosexuality has actual laws acknowledging its validity, standard law applies to it.

(I THINK THIS COMMENT MIGHT BE LONGER THAN MY ORIGINAL POST TOO!)

Another thing I’m curious/concerned about in the wake of gay marriage is the sort of smaller scale things that have benefited all sorts of non-married couples because of gay couples. For example, I imagine that the many employers who gave health insurance to extralegal domestic partners are going to stop doing so now that they can. (This is less of an issue in California, which has had an equivalent practice for civil Domestic Partnerships as it’s had for marriage, but this could prove to be really annoying in future states that accept gay marriage.)

Where civil unions are concerned, is there a precedent for changing the name of a government-recognized contract across the board? For some reason the first thing that springs to mind here (as a naming issue, not a marriage issue) is the fact that the UK can’t stop Camilla from being Queen of England if and when Prince Charles ever ascends to the throne, not without changing the constitution of the UK and every commonwealth country. But everyone has agreed to call her the Duchess of Cornwall anyway. The US could, I suppose, come to a similar agreement and say that what we now call marriage will henceforth be referred to as civil unions, even though technically the law calls it marriage. But I doubt people would go along with that in any significant numbers. Most married/civil unionized people would want to call themselves married, much more than anyone wants to talk about Queen Camilla. Meanwhile, for the language change to be official and written down, there would be scads (I counted) of laws that would need their wording revised. I don’t know how much time and process would have to be sunk into that task, but it doesn’t sound like an easy sell.

So I agree with your position philosophically–the idea that the government recognizes a contract, the participants of which may or may not choose to consider it a marriage–but I guess I don’t see how that change would be effected.

(France does have entirely different concepts of civil and religious marriage, but I’ve never quite understood the way they handle it–you have to have a civil ceremony before you’re allowed to have a religious one. If the religious ceremony doesn’t count toward the civil contract, why does the state care when you have it?)

(AND JUST TO MAKE THIS COMMENT LONGER, I am glad to see on the comments to Alison Bechdel’s blog that someone has saved the Amazon bookstore. I’ve never been there but I know there was at least one big fan of theirs among my mom’s store’s clientele. She was (and still is, I presume) a very interesting lady, a lesbian minister therapist barista, and I am highly in favor of bookstores for interesting people.)