Civil union versus marriage...the benefits are different.
FactCheck.org: What Is a Civil Union?
They absolutely are now, thanks to the rejection of civil unions by gay activists back in the 1970s and 1980s. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was an indirect direct response to that rejection, where gay rights activists refused to accept civil unions without the word "Marriage" being attached to it. Several states were strongly in favor of granting civil unions to same-sex couples specifically because of the problems that some long-term gay couples were having when one of them died and the deceased's family, who didn't approve of the relationship, basically cut out the surviving partner from everything, including community property, visitation rights while their partner was in the hospital, a whole host of issues that spouses received which same-sex partners did not.
But civil unions, with the same exact benefits, including federal benefits, wasn't good enough unless it was defined as a marriage rather than just a civil union. So, homosexuals rejected the offer, and that's when they began in earnest to use the court system to get what they wanted. They'd find sympathetic liberal judges who would rule in their favor, rulings that were rarely overturned because reversals usually only happen in cases of procedural errors or erroneous applications of current law and precedent. And every ruling that was not overturned became a precedent all on its own.
The majority of people in society didn't like the courts legislating from the bench, especially when it came to homosexuals attempting to force their views onto society at large. The people fought back and demanded that marriage actually be defined as it traditionally has been, and the DOMA was signed into legislation as a result of that. The people in more than 30 states have voted against gay marriage since then, sometimes overriding the legislations of their liberal representatives. Some of those voting referendums and new legislations which define marriage have also gone as far as to forbid even civil unions, the very civil unions that was offered 30 or more years ago. That's how far the backlash has gone. And the Gay Activists keep on fighting.
Know that whatever you read on FactCheck.org is biased, despite their facade. They are run by and funded by an extremely liberal organization, Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania the director of which,
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, is a professor and the author of several books on communication and deception, particularly in liberal politics, and how to win at it.
She is one of the world's foremost experts on political deception, a proud socialist, and is in charge of the self-billed "non-partisan" FactCheck.org. Read everything at that site with a jaundiced eye.
Here's an
excerpt from a previous post about FactCheck.org. I encourage people to read the entire post to get a better idea about that organization, despite the fact that I wrote it.
If you wanted to deceive people who are trying to differentiate between truth and lies on the Internet how would you do it? If you were extremely devious and had no conscience, you might set up a Web site with some official and unbiased sounding name that claims to be the encyclopedia of truth to be used as a tool for anyone who has the same biased view and wants to make believe to "back it up" with what they would like you to think is "indisputable fact." If you are really good at it you will use careful wordsmithing to avoid projecting bias in individual articles, and instead be selective in the facts you use and which facts you want to check.
That's precisely what FactCheck.org, and others like it do, and are. Most telling, perhaps, about FactCheck.org is the overall number and kind of articles they do publish. They have an awful lot of articles defending president Obama, and their criticisms of him are with regards to mostly inconsequential issues.
In addition to the copious number of articles which defend Obama, they are very kind to other liberal issues, such as same-sex marriage, and treat those issues in the same manner they treat Obama.
