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That’s right! The ACLU is now supporting a man in his struggle to take the last name of the woman he intends to marry without undergoing the traditional name change procedure for anyone wishing to rename themselves. The plaintiff, Michael Buday, is alleging that the $320 fee he must pay, as well as the advertisements he must take out in newspapers to announce the official name change, constitute discrimination, since his wife could change her last name for a mere $50 as part of the process of formalizing the marriage. The full story is available here.

I appreciate this man’s efforts to put back in the past another rediculously outdated notion, that of a woman becoming the property of her husband upon marrying him. Also, it should shed some light once again on the difference between the state’s civil definition of marriage and various Christian organizations’ religious views on the institution which unfortunately shares the common name of ‘marriage.’ What may seem at first silly is in fact a serious point of contention in this country right now, especially in light of the struggle of gay rights groups to achieve the same legal and civil protections which secular marriage laws now afford only to heterosexual couples. We must, as a nation, come to understand that the reasons for two people to come together and share their lives with one another are often unrelated to any Christian or other religious values, and that offering secular advantages for adherents to certain religious viewpoints violates the separation of church and state that we supposedly hold so dear to our very basic notion of liberty.

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NB: The following was originally posted in response to an article on Anti-Strib.blogspot.com.

Actually, I would debate the statement that marriage is a religious institution, and that a civil union is its legal equivalent. As long as the word ‘marriage’ is used to describe a contract between a man and a women in which the government recognizes the two as a single entity for tax purposes, and extends privileges to couples that are not offered to single people living together, marriage must be a legal institution. Since separation of church and state is necessary to the functioning of our republic, it must be recognized that this distinction exists: the religious institution of marriage, entered into by many millions in this country in various houses of worship, is separate and in addition to the legal contract into which couples enter in their town hall or local government office. I support equal legal privileges for both heterosexual and homosexual couples, and I would have no problem calling that a ‘civil union,’ so long as when I go down to town hall myself, and enter into the same contract with my girlfriend as a heterosexual man, it is also termed a ‘civil union.’ Then, if we choose to be married in a church representing one of our two faiths, we can receive that designation in accordance with the tenets of that faith, which preclude homosexuality. In other words, I have no desire to force homosexuality into the religious sphere, but I also do not want to see religion used as a tool to affect our purposefully secular government.