Why Civil Unions are not and never will be enough.

At first glance, civil unions seem excellent, you keep the religious conservatives happy by keeping marriage between a person in a male body and a person in a female body and you make those pushy activists content with a form of union between gays and lesbians. To many of us in the movement for equality between straights and gays civil unions seems like a reasonable compromise for equality.

However, it is not and never will be enough. It is second class, and any society that has classes is an unjust society. According to theNational Center for Lesbian Rights there are some gigantic disadvantages to civil unions currently. They do not get any of the 1,138 benefits of marriage from the federal government. Most states will not recognize civil unions. They also do not have the clarity of marriage, not having the same benefits state to state as marriage does.

But this is not nearly as egregious as the most dangerous status of civil unions. If the entire United States gave marriages to heterosexual couples and civil unions to gay couples they are in two distinct classes. Because the lists are separate it takes only a swipe of a pen to eliminate all the rights for gays by eliminating civil unions. The Radical Christians would have no problem doing this.

This is still not as dangerous as it truly is. If the Radical Christians become any more radicalized they could instead hunt gays like in Uganda. They would have all the information there and it would be easy to find them. Replace the benefits with punishments. It may seem a long ways off but it is still a possibility that would be easy to do.

Also, in Washington State anyone can view people with Civil Unions on the Secretary of State's website. This puts them at terrible risk for hate crimes and losing business and not getting jobs (by giving another reason).

This must end now. This is why we must not bow to hate. We must demand that all people get the same recognition under the same name, Marriage. It must be on a nationwide level so that people who currently don't know people who are gay will be able to turn off the hateful rhetoric that comes from so many radicals throughout the country. Until then equality will not be possible.