Greetings in that Divine and Most Precious Name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!
The US government just needs to stay out of marriage, it is a religious institution. Leave it to each individual church. As long as they don't force the Orthodox Church to marry gays I don't care. Let the Anglicans and whomever marry gays. It's not the governments right to interfere in religion.
So should Americans kindly return all the legal benefits of marriage such as tax credits and insurance benefits too? That will be real popular

Civil Unions are not exclusively homosexual, in fact in California history they were initiated for heterosexual, non-married couples and homosexual couples fought in the courts to receive the same status. There are a lot of legal reasons for the government to rightfully recognize marriage, in fact during slavery, one of the most dehumanizing aspects was that black social institutions and families were purposefully broken up and disregarded, and the affects of this on the black family in America is still with us today hundreds of years later!
If the government stayed out of the Church's working of marriage, we'd solve all our mutual grievances. If the government had folks who were married in the Church ALSO apply for civil unions instead of marriage licenses, we might not be having this divisive debate in the US today. We have a separation of Church and State for good reason in America (after all, during the Colonial era the Puritans executed as many people as did the Inquisition, some estimates even suggest many many more died in the colonies

) and religious marriage should therefore rightfully be separated from sociocultural and legal institutions.
In other words, if the state keeps up out of our business in the Church, we will have no reason to get into their secular business in regards to homosexuals and non-married heterosexual
couples (equally taboo in Orthodox society).
stay blessed,
habte selassie
stay blessed,
habte selassie