I am deeply offended by that. I worked in a municipal government for several years and I can assure you that there are plenty of Republican civil servants who take their jobs just as seriously and act with as much impartiality as their Democratic counterparts.

Like I said, to dismiss someone as “biased” only because they have the opposite political orientation is Trump-level reasoning.

I don’t consider mere membership in a political party as very strong evidence of bias. There are only two viable political parties in America and “membership” is nothing more than ticking a box on a form. Even I’m technically a Republican despite being a “woke lefty” because I just wanted to vote against Trump in the 2024 primary election and because it causes the Republican Party to waste money mailing me “get out the vote” campaign material which I immediately throw in the recycle bin.

Civil servants are allowed to have political leanings. This doesn’t make them automatically biased. That is Donald Trump-level reasoning. Just like he was wrong to attack the New York prosecutor who happens to be a Democrat, I’m not going to attack this guy just because he happens to be a Republican.

I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Am I reading this wrong? The article seems to indicate that he’s just a civil servant prosecutor? Is there any indication of bias?

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.