Chris

For myself, as a Christian, I see the marriage relationship between one man and one woman as part of the created order, so it is difficult to see it as anything other than that, whether or not those getting married acknowledge God. However this just serves to underline the difficulty of trying to align something that has been essentially Christian in our culture for longer than anyone can remember with a modern legal framework that is becoming increasingly post-religious and is required to acknowledge other ways of looking at the world.

Your point about the correct terminology for any non-Christian union is a good one. In fact if you have a Register Office wedding you are not currently allowed any religious references in the ceremony at all, although the word marriage is of course allowed. I think the reason the word is not objected to in those circumstances by society at large is because it has been a very long time indeed since there were laws banning any kind of marriage except Christian ones. Society has simply become used to it. However in this case we are dealing with something which is not going to gradually become accepted, but which would (in theory) go from being illegal one day to legal the next. This makes little allowance for the fact that attitudes can change a lot more slowly than laws do and I think goes some way towards explaining why it is only gay marriage that is causing objections.