solarbird | (Reply)

From:

The "label," however, does matter. Trivially, it matters - eventually - for Federal and interstate purposes. More importantly, the word matters for legal purposes within a state. See for example the recent ruling in New York regarding their CU law saying that the fact that the CU law was a different law to the marriage law meant, even though they were intentionally structured identically in the separate-but-equal sense, the mere fact that they were separate was legal cause to treat them differently in said court. And that proceeded to happen.

Also, on-the-ground experience in California shows that legal authorities can, will, and do treat CU couples differently in important legal ways to married couples, even though that's against the law. This also matters. Local officials can, will, and have disregarded same-sex CUs in ways that the word "marriage" stopped cold in its tracks. It's reasonable to argue that this is a matter of education, but that's... nontrivial, in reality.