I'm afraid this will be rather long, bear with me.

To kick things off I'd like to offer a quote from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity from the chapter entitled "Christian Marriage". It was mainly written concerning divorce and athiests who get married (listen up Bitt!) but he says a few things which could apply here:

Now everyone who has been married in a church has made a public, solemn promise to stick to his (or her) partner till death. The duty of keeping that promise has no special connection with sexual morality: it is in the same position as any other promise. If, as modern people are always telling us, the sexual impulse is just like all our other impulses; and as their indulgence is controlled by our promises, so should its be. If, as I think, it is not like all out other impulses, but is morbidly inflamed, then we should be specially careful not to let it lead us into dishonesty.

To this someone may reply that he regarded the promise made in church as a mere formality and never intended to keep it. Whom, then, was he trying to deceive when he made it? God? That was really very unwise. Himself? That was not very much wiser. The bride, or bridegroom, or the 'in-laws'? That was treacherous. More often, I think, the couple (or one of them) hoped to deceive the public. They wanted the respectability that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price: that is, they were impostors, they cheated.

It is that last sentance, I assert, that also applies to homosexual couples.

Before I get ahead of myself, let me clarify something:

there seems to be a difference between ``civil union'' and ``marriage''

Christians define marriage as an institution ordained by God, between a man and a woman. Other religions have similer definitions. WE DO NOT WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO INTRUDE ON OUR DEFINITIONS. If two people want to form some kind of government-regulated contractual bond between them (civil-union), whatever their gender, that is fine. But it is NOT a marriage. I think now you will see how that quote relates to all this. Homosexual couples "want the respectability that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price" same as the athiest couples. The price, in this case being, finding a partner of the opposit sex and having the discipline to learn to get along with them dispite your differences, as well as, of course, beliving in the God you are making these vows to.

Now, if homosexual couples want to go to some secular huminist church and get married, fine. But neither I nor The Methodist Church (or Baptists, or Cathloic, or whatever, I simply said Methodist because that is the church I happen to belong to) is required to acknowledge it.

what happened to the no church / state thing?

Athiests get married all the time.

Isn't that just proof that the courts have already diluted marriage by interfering?

Yes.

So the best course of action is:

calling the state-side thing "civil union" and then rewriting 1,500 statutes to use that as the term defining these couples

because we, as Christians, are not interested in compromising our beliefes just so a few overpaid/underworked government employees can do a bit less "paperwork". I would also propose that, since all those laws were written with heterosexual couples in mind, they all be re-worked and re-debated over, since the public (this being a democracy and all) might feel differently about them knowing they might apply to any gender combination.

Christian marriage is a population thing, just like opposition to birth control is a population thing.

I'm afraid you are wrong on both accounts. As I said before, this is about God, and what He has chosen marriage to be. Marriage is a religious term. Allowing the government to say just anybody is married is on the level with the government saying that whenever anybody eats bread and drinks wine they are having Holy Communion. They arn't, they are simply eating bread and drinking wine.

I won't get into the opposition to birth control thing because I don't understand it compleatly and don't agree with it. I do understand it enough to know it's not about population.