Two excellent reasons to OPPOSE gay marriage in the UK

[Ryantology]

It's a good emotive argument, but it does a disservice to the injustice of racial segregation (and to the homosexuals who face(d) true oppression). This is even highlighted in your picture, where the whites had the nice clean tidy sink and the blacks the dirty one in the corner. The important part of the picture isn't that they are labelled differently, but that they are actually treated differently. A more accurate representation of civil partnerships would be to have both labels over the nice clean tidy sink.

The entire idea of civil unions is that the religious concede the legal benefit of marriage to gay people while still being able to exclude them from the club, so to speak. For religious opponents of marriage equality, it is precisely what that image indicates: separate but equal. It is a concession to modernity which still allows the religious majority to exclude the minority, under the guise of preserving a tradition (which most of them don't understand correctly). Gay people can't call it marriage for no reason other than because the religious have stolen the term, claimed it as their own, and won't give it up without a fight.

The other major problem is that civil unions are not as equal as they are separate, at least, in the United States. Civil unions do not confer federal-level benefits the way marriage does, so you get state-level benefits only.

My argument basically says every "joining of people" should be treated the same, like any other contract, and any label and ceremony attached to that is left to the people involved to decide. The government should have no role in recognising (or not) marriage. If you can show me why this would be a bad idea I'm all ears.

This would be fine for me.