Red Alert: Your marriage is under attack!

You may have heard that, along with the presidential and congressional elections, several states had important cultural measures on their ballots, most visibly (not to say most importantly) the legalization (decriminalization?) of marijuana in Colorado and Washington and the lifting of a ban on gay marriage in Maine, Maryland and Washington.  Though the two measures both fall under the umbrella of 'legislating morality' (isn't this an oxymoron?), I'd like to treat only the latter issue, and the terrible logic that is used to deny a civil right to many people.  Generally, the argument against gay marriage hinges upon a supposed overlap between the traditional, religious definition of marriage and gay marriage as it may be defined by any new legislation.  Introduction of the latter, it is claimed, may damage the former.  The problem is what we call in logic an equivocation.  In simple grammatical terms, an equivocation is a homonym (the same material word with two different meanings).  When used in an argument, the results are generally quite silly:

The sign said, "Fine for Parking Here".

Since it was fine, I parked here.

This same problem occurs in the debate over gay marriage.  The kind of marriage that is regulated by the state has nothing to do with love, sex, commitment--the ideas we associate with so-called traditional marriage.  Instead, state regulated marriage simply concerns issues of taxation, inheritance laws, powers of attorney and the like.  This is why we sometimes call them civil unions (N.B. all you legally married heteros--your legal contract is simply a civil union as well; you're only married in the religious sense in the eyes of your church/synagogue/mosque).  So, if you are against gay marriage, you are merely against two people of the same sex filing their taxes jointly--is that really an argument worth having?