Does being adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage make someone a bigot?

[Humanist_Activist]

214. Marriages in the United States aren't a joint civil/religious institution...

the several states(and they vary on this) allow non-government officials to represent the state in officiating marriages in those states. Those individuals may or may not be members of religious organizations, or even be clergy. Due to the nature of the 1st and 14th amendments, states are generally not allowed to arbitrarily restrict this privilege to select groups or individuals. However, those individuals and groups are, generally, exempt from performing marriages they are not willing to perform.

Classic example are interfaith marriages, many churches, with officiants in the form of clergy will refuse to marry such couples, even though, if a magistrate attempted the same, they would be violating the law. Another example would be churches refusing to marry interracial couples, that actually happened recently, and it was perfectly legal, because they are a "private club" allowed to set their own rules, exempting them from laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The fact is, nothing would change for these churches that refuse to perform same sex marriages, they can and have continued to deny performing such marriages into the future.

As far as the country's ethic, its not based on Christianity at all, but rather on several writers and philosophies of the Enlightenment and Late Medieval Period, with some Greek and Roman thought put in. Our common law was inherited from the English, who themselves inherited it from the Danelaw, which was pagan, if anything.

The point with MLK, which you seemed to have missed is that the people who actually knew him, his wife and Bayard among them, knew him as a pragmatic man, who had to compromise on certain principles at the time to make certain advances, but was himself not full of hate towards gays. He could have denounced and refused Bayard, instead he tried to stand by him. That counts for something.