It is also my personal opinion that the Constitution of the United States should have jack shit to say about this. It's not what a Constitution is for. Nor should there even be Federal legislation on this.*

If it is handled anywhere, it should be at the state level, and even there it does not seem to me to be an issue for a state constitution, which is where this issue seems to be percolating.

The legal issues come in because married couples are treated differently under many laws than singles, or roommates, or Significant Others. Maybe this is the issue that needs addressing.

Unfortunately, there already is Federal legislation on this issue: the Defense of Marriage Act, passed with veto-proof majorities and signed into law by Clinton in 1996. Introduced as a reaction to the Hawaiian state law, it "protects" other states from being sued to acknowledge same-sex marriages made in any state where that might become legal. It also defines "marriage" and "spouse" for purpose of Federal law as exclusively heterosexual. That includes many of those ways "married couples are treated differently", including Federal tax rates and SS survivor's benefits (I'm presuming Veteran's benefits, as well).

And there's more on the way: the Marriage Protection Act, introduced last month, when the Massachusetts case was still pending. Here's the text.

And guess what... a proposed Amendment to the Constitution is also already on the floor. It defines marriage as hetero-only, then categorically denies benefits to all unmarried partnerships. (By the way, none of this was known to me before I started the research for this post).

Anyway, it's the differences in treatment - a.k.a. "entitlements", one of your favorite words - which is exactly the point. Our society has evolved a system of rewards for entering into marriage, without any 'means test' other than a certain lack of consanguinity (which varies from state to state, I've heard). It used to be a 'safe' assumption that each partner was of a different gender than the other - but the assumption is no longer automatically true. As you've pointed out, social mores (if not morals) evolve, too.

But I get the feeling that this is less important than dismantling the "oppressive" religious moral structures in America.

Well, y'know.... We could, and perhaps ought to, spend some time discussing the Separation of Church and State, too. Denying equal protection on religious grounds is already illegal; if opponents of same-sex marriage have any objections not based on religious principle, I have yet to hear them - other than procreation, which I touched on earlier.

My initial post questioned the need to create, and enforce in law, a narrow definition of a word, marriage. I'm fully aware of the various states of mind and emotion that bind two people in many forms of relationship equivalent to marriage - many times, far more permanently than a legal marriage. An inclusive society might allow all such relationships the same rights, benefits, responsibilities, and penalties for malfeasance, under a blanket classification. A society interested in a just compromise might, as some have suggested, institute a parallel classification but grant equal protection to all... It just seems more elegant, if I may borrow the term from mathematics, to open the existing door wider than to cut a new one.