Pope endorses same sex civil unions
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I live in Argentina. During 2010 the congress approved the same sex marriage. The opposition from the Catholic Church was fierce; and Bergoglio was his main leader.
The Wikipedia page in Spanish has more context about it: https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrimonio_entre_personas_de...
Edit: typo
Decoupling those concepts removes the whole debate.
The reasons for the state incentivizing men and women getting married are gone or at least no longer prerequisites. So since we like the financial benefits, even though the reasons are gone, just expand the state-sponsored concept to any combination of humans that want them. Any opposition is clearly religious people viewing their government as an extension of their religion, or just completely conflating the concepts that coincidentally have the same name, and they out themselves making it easy to ignore.
The largest financial penalty in many countries is that spouses will pay more income-related taxes in dual-income families vs. if they were single, due to how progressive taxation bands are set up.
The benefits of government recognition for most people who marry aren’t financial - they’re to do with parental, health, estate, citizenship/immigration-related, and other rights that largely can’t fully be reliably created by contracts.
In some cases, a single person could specify somebody in particular, but it's more flexible. This is a common default case that applies widely, and those who choose not to get married can apply the same overrides that others can.
In the case of social security survivor benefits, there's a definite asymmetry where married people get a benefit that single people don't. It covers a common case for two people who have their finances so tightly linked that the salary really is joint between the two of them, such that the social security payment really is intended to cover both.
There should perhaps be a similar rule for people who have a similar arrangement without the benefit of legal marriage, but it wouldn't be easy to recreate the entire legal apparatus that joins the two, which is what makes that survivorship benefit reasonable. Effectively you'd need to create a state of civil union, and now you're just playing semantics with the difference between civil union and marriage.
Benefits and legal status are important, but social and cultural equality is important as well.
Marriage was originally a financial/economic arrangement; it was originally of both religious and civic character because while it was a legal/financial arrangement, the idea of the religious space being separate from the civic was literally thousands of years in the future.
As religious and civic spheres much later did split, both of them continued to concern themselves with marriage, for different reasons.
> Any opposition is clearly religious people viewing their government as an extension of their religion
People can legitimately have different views about whether and what the civil purpose of marriage is and consequently whether and with what parameters it should be offered, without either side viewing the government as an extension of their religion.
Now, certainly, there are positions in civil marriage that are frequently taken for that reason, but that's not the same thing as what you are suggesting.
I wonder if there are more shell corporation out there waiting to _almost_ support basic human rights?
This is simply not possible.
This would be like the church endorsing Ashley Madison.
They can support the rights of people in these positions. But they can't support the position.
He could support civil union laws perhaps, just like he could and should support adulterous people having rights.
Seems like fake news that's twisting the intent of the words he actually says (Which we can't hear for ourselves yet to check?)
The Pope promoted the separation of church and state.