New Jersey legislators have voted to create civil unions for gay couples, though also left open the possibility of extending full marriage rights in the future. I find myself less inclined than I used to be to reject this as an unacceptable “separate but equal” solution for a couple reasons. The legal semantic difference matters insofar as it signifies a state endorsed status difference. But this doesn’t have to be the case: If a state issues marriage (or civil union) licenses using the gendered terms “husband” and “wife” rather than the neutral “spouse,” it isn’t necessarily endorsing a sexual inequality, though we can imagine a social context in which the terms would be loaded in a way that it would be.

What matters, then, is largely how any terminological difference cashes out socially. And maybe just because “civil union” is an unwieldy term, I doubt it will make much difference. Nobody is actually going to say: “Bill just got civil-unioned; have you met his civil union partner Steve?” They’re going to say: “Bill got married; have you met his husband Steve?” And that tendency will be reinforced insofar as people who seek civil unions also hold private commitment ceremonies, whether secular or religious, which I can’t imagine won’t just be referred to as “weddings.” And all that, in turn, brings us a fair way closer to my actual preferred outcome: a scenario where we all recognize “civil unions” as just a state-sanctioned legal arrangement (of which there could be many varieties), and “marriage” as a private ceremonial commitment that might or might not have anything to do with the legal institution.