Thread:Comments:California's same-sex marriage ban ruled unconstitutional; appeal expected/The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world/reply (9)

Civil unions do not "confer all the privileges and benefits of marriage under another name." The very existence of such a two-tiered system denotes discrimination, as such the policy of "civil unions" shares a striking resemblance to The "separate but equal" policies used to persecute the Black minority in the United States before the US Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Such blatant legal discrimination is fundamentally inseparable from persecution.