How does it affect your marriage?
It devalue meaning of it.
It's like calling everyone that has vagina a lady.
Don't you get it? This is a legal issue. A marriage license is just a legal contract between two people. The only value it has is in regard to the legal privileges and responsibilities associated with the contract.
A religious marriage may certainly have requirements different from a civil marriage as is the case with Catholic marriages today.
I got the legal part. I don't get why they wanna call it something that is not.
I guess for the same reason that every woman wants to be called lady. It make's them feeeeeeel good.
Marriage is the only way to guarantee that gay and lesbian couples will have the same legal protections of other married couples.
The alternative would be a civil union which exist in only a few states. It would be virtual impossible to recreate this legal status in every state as well as the federal level and change God knows how many laws through out the country to make the civil union equal to marriage in eyes of the law.
Then there would be the issue of company policies. Most companies only recognized the status of married or single so every business would need to change it's policies, again virtually impossible.
Since there are only 4 countries in the world that have civil unions, this status would not be recognized in most other countries.
The marriage is the only institution that can be assign to gay and lesbian couples that would guarantee the same protections under the law as marriage.