They also did the right thing in staying out of defining "marriage." As I've noted before, it's a loaded word because marriage is not only a legal term, it is a sacrament in religious ceremonies; one of the few that is defined in both law books and Scripture and has equal standing in both civil and religious connotations. But the simple recognition that two people who wish to make a legally binding comitment to each other under the laws of the state cannot be limited simply because they happen to be of the same gender is a small step forward.
The Christianists will now do the Right thing; that is, they will whoop up a massive fund-raising campaign and scream about "protecting marriage" from the ravages of redefinition by "activist judges" who had the nerve to actually read the Constitution of the State of New Jersey and find that all people in the state are entitled to the same rights. They're incensed that the Court has deferred to the State Legislature for the purpose of defining exactly what gay and lesbian couples are entitled to in terms of civil unions:
“The court is holding a legal gun to the head of the State Legislature, and saying, ‘Listen, there are two bullets, you get to pick the bullet: either gay marriage or civil unions,’ ” said Matt Daniels, president of Alliance for Marriage, an organization based in the Washington area that supports a federal Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. “And that is not democracy. That is court-imposed policy-making that takes this out of the hands of the people.”Excuse me, Mr. Daniels, but who do you think the State Legislature does represent?
The righties can make all the noise they want, and unless the people of New Jersey are quite stupid, this will have no impact on the Senate race between Tom Kean, Jr. and Bob Menendez since this was a state ruling and has no federal impact. And, as John at AMERICAblog pointed out, civil unions were okay with President Bush in 2004:
President Bush said in an interview this past weekend that he disagreed with the Republican Party platform opposing civil unions of same-sex couples and that the matter should be left up to the states.John Aravosis says that this ruling amounts to "separate but equal" in terms of the gay-marriage movement, equating it with the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in the United States Supreme Court that defined civil rights for blacks in America for nearly sixty years and was overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. While I agree that civil unions are not the same as marriage, I also think that we as a nation are moving along a lot faster than we did in terms of the civil rights movement, and considering the progress we've made in terms of gay rights in my lifetime, the ruling is better than the nothing-burger handed us by the State of New York and the odious anti-gay marriage amendment that the Religious Reich tried -- and failed -- to foist on the United States Constitution. The ruling is a small step, but it is an important one, and one that cannot be taken back.
[...]
Mr. Bush has previously said that states should be permitted to allow same-sex unions, even though White House officials have said he would not have endorsed such unions as governor of Texas. But Mr. Bush has never before made a point of so publicly disagreeing with his party's official position on the issue.
[...]
"I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights. And I strongly believe that marriage ought to be defined as between a union between a man and a woman. Now, having said that, states ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others."
