Thread:Comments:California's same-sex marriage ban ruled unconstitutional; appeal expected/The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world/reply (23)

Your rebuttal is quite poorly conceived, as it tries to synthesize new circumstances that are not essential to the described system. There's no reason the document can't be drafted with only two check-boxes and the options "Single" and "Marriage / Civil Union." This is already the sort of thing that census documents do to consolidate effectively identical options (e.g. differences in terminology for referring to various races). You argue that the government could create problems for itself in this way, but in that case why not other ways? Even if gay marriages are granted, the question could be "Are you in a married relationship that would have been considered valid in the U.S. c.a. 1950?" I'm sure the government could ask all sorts of idiotic, pointless questions and thereby create unnecessary trouble for itself. That's not in doubt.