It’s a (deliberate) consequence of the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004. If you’re married, you can’t legally change gender: you have to divorce first. Then, if you actually wanted to stay married in the first place, you can contract a civil partnership, but you have to wait for the Gender Recognition Certificate since civil partnership only applies to same-sex couples.

Extending marriage to same-sex couples would have avoided this little piece of absurdity: after all, it’s not like transsexuals don’t have enough bureaucratic hoops to jump through already.

Of course, people can have a religious marriage on top of the civil marriage but it has no standing in the law.
And most (Christian) people who want some kind of religious ceremony go for a simple blessing ceremony, not the full-fledged marriage sacrament.

I must confess that I have a hard time understanding the US conception of marriage.

If you’re Anglican you don’t have to involve the registry office. If you’re (e.g.) Catholic, you hire the registrar to turn up with the book to sign at your wedding ceremony.

I know a couple who were married, one of whom changed gender, divorced, and rejoined as a civil partnership with their original spouse. I’m not sure whether they were required to do that to remain married but I believe so.

In the UK, civil marriages are purely secular – and a good thing too for the atheist population. Hence (partly) my confusion.

At the same time Québec also has a civil union that is almost identical to marriage (http://www.justice.gouv.qc.ca/francais/publications/generale/union-civ.htm). Choice is good.

As an aside to 26/27, in Europe since Napoleon’s reforms, marriages are not legally performed by church officials any more.

That—the way you use the word compelled—doesn’t make sense to me. A church isn’t legally compelled to marry anyone that the church doesn’t want to marry. Their hand is not forced. I mean… there are churches in my state which refuse to marry two persons of “heterogeneous ethnic heritage” and they don’t get in legal hot water for it. If they can do THAT in the 21st century, surely they can refuse to marry homosexual couples.

The reason this has to be a “legal” issue is many laws, e.g. regarding life insurance, explicitly refer to a “spouse” and the status of being “married” in the code. However much you’d like it differently, marriage is not religious. It’s a secular social contract and—even if we agree to the premise that marriage was at any time ever a sacrament under the sole authority of one religion, which we don’t—marriage has been secular at least since the days of allowing a justice of the peace to perform the ceremony.

OK, I won’t say any more because this is already wandering past the bounds of propriety into churlishness. Sorry for that; phrases like “threat to society” get under my skin. Language like that leads to, you know, countermeasures.

However, offering alternative contracts that are similar to but different from marriage in significant ways can have socially significant outcomes. Those outcomes could be desirable or undesirable for both liberals and conservatives, but will probably depend on the specific social environment. For example, in the wrong conservative social environment offering a marriage like contract that did not include much financial protection for a lower earning partner in the case of divorce could be disastrous for women. On the other hand, maybe some states are ready to offer different alternatives that will actually lead to better gender equality. And you can probably tell just-so stories both ways, so it would probably take a lot of research to really get to the truth of the matter.

The conservatives are right that things are a changing. They couldn’t be more wrong that banning gay marriage will actually get them anything they want (aside from being able to be mean to gay people, of course). But the proliferation of alternative domestic arrangements, some of which will be recognized and supported by state law or corporate practice will have interesting social consequences.

In general, marriage has a strong emotional attachment that a civil union doesn’t have. For some people, it’s a positive attachment and they are glad they can postpone the ‘real’ marriage to a day that suits, while still having all the tax and legal benefits (which are not seen as the really important part of a marriage) .

For others, it’s the opposite, they associate a marriage with a heavy bind they don’t want. In my experience, some people who come from strict religious backgrounds are glad to avoid actual marriage.

I’m struggling here, because the premise seems to be that civil unions give you something which marriage also gives you but without the additional something which only marriage gives you, and I’m not sure what goes in the first box, let alone the second. We got married because we wanted to make a public commitment and have it witnessed by family and friends – and, er, that’s it. It gave my wife an alternative surname which she could use when she wanted to (hers often requires spelling out), but mostly she doesn’t. The only thing I’m aware of that actually changed afterwards was that her mother was willing to come and visit us, and I don’t think most people’s parents are moral enough to make that an issue.