Robin Wilson writes in the LA Times: “As a growing number of states stand poised to pass interracial marriage laws, they should consider this: It’s possible to legalize interracial marriage without infringing on religious liberty.” Okay. It’s not quite the actual quote. I replaced “same-sex” with “interracial” to point out that the cry for “religious liberty” is really a cover-up for a cry for allowing continued discrimination based on outdated (and sometimes absurd) rules that have no place in a secular world. Yet, despite this country’s claim that religion and state are separated many call for bending over backwards to enable the continuation of this discrimination. The solution, imo: Make legal marriage a state institution. If people want to discriminate in their religion they can set their own rules for marriage but this marriage is not the legal institution. If they want to take advantage of the more than 1,000 legal benefits, they better accept reality and secular law.

Of course, the best solution would be to do away with all those legal benefits that come with marriage and instead turn marriage into the symbolic institution that many people claim it is and stop discriminating based on marital status (or better yet based on conjugal status).

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