First of all - marriage, these days, is no longer exclusively a 'sacrament'. It can be. The same word also applies to those who were married in entirely non-religious ways.

"Civil unions" are bunk. They are the whole 'separate but equal' thing. The state has secular marriage and the state should not in any way discriminate. Therefore let everyone marry in a secular fashion. All you need is consenting adults. Period. Let homosexual folks marry in the same way as atheists or agnostics do. Simple, no need to discriminate, problem solved.

Now, making churches marry whom the state decides - that's not a good idea. Basically it means that any state has the right to dictate religious doctrine, which makes the entire religion essentially meaningless as it can no longer define its own beliefs. *IF* all marriages had to be done in churches, you might have an argument, but they don't, we have civil marriages.

It is true that the state and the church but heads on things where the rules of one conflict with the rules of the other. We're seeing this with the burqa rulings in France, for instance. That's a thorny issue in a free society. Obviously there have to be some limits or some 'churches' would set themselves up to do human sacrifice or some such and claim it's not murder because 'they're a church'. This is very much the way some of the Fundamentalist Mormon groups get away with child sexual abuse and forced marriages of children and we're seeing the state bumping heads with them right now in Texas over it.

Churches are, for the most part, older than our existing laws and society. As such, they are used to being a law unto themselves within certain limits. In fact, in the middle ages, they literally WERE a law unto themselves and had their own separate legal system called canon law.

Now, we have a largely secular society but the churches are still around. If you tell a church that it has to marry gays will the next level of 'non-discrimination' be that it also has to accept gays into their congregation? Ordain them into the priesthood? And you're going to try and shove this onto a group which have all been taught that these people are abominations which God would prefer to destroy? That's not going to work out.

The church and state in the 21st century are still finding their equilibrium, with the power coming down primarily on the secular state side. However the churches aren't done just yet as we have seen. For the most part, the state has decided, "If you aren't hurting anyone, you just do your own thing over there and it's all good," about the church. That's called religious freedom and in the US it's a right enshrined in the constitution. As such, the state has no right to dictate their beliefs, and that includes who they have to include, ordain and, yes, marry.

Whether the rules of various churches were really written by God, or just by men masquerading as divinely inspired, is never going to get solved. But in almost all cases those rules were written more than a couple hundred years ago (the Mormons are one big exception) with all the prejudices and hatreds of their era. Indeed, a common misconception is that churches ban 'homosexuals' in their doctrines. They don't. The term 'homosexual' meaning a person who prefers love and sex with a member of their own gender, is a fairly modern one - only being about a hundred or so years old.

What the churches are talking about is individuals who are guilty of the SIN of committing homosexual acts. When those rules were written the concept of a person BEING homosexual, didn't really exist. You were just a person who could DO homosexual things. And if you did you were a bad person. The authors of those documents didn't 'get' that homosexuality is all through nature (which makes it funny when they rant about it being 'unnatural' because of course it quite literally isn't) which kind of leads us to the likelihood that if those sect's beliefs were divinely inspired, then the humans writing them down pooched it - because certainly GOD would know that homosexuality, is as we currently understand it, not unnatural at all and not something that is a choice but the way a person's brain is wired. Which leads us, really, to 'churches are bunk made up by people for their own reasons' but that's an entirely different issue (and argument) which no one is going to settle here. Let Hitchens and Dawkins fight that fight, they do it better and seem to have more fun at it.