Until relatively recent times, marriage has been regarded by most of civilized society in sacred terms.  It is precisely this reverence for the married state that led to a fascinating mix of tacit and explicit terminology and tradition in defining what marriage is in social, legal and even physical terms.  (Add to that the interest of the Church in the nature of marriage and you introduce a sacramental dimension that completes what marriage is in moral and spiritual terms.)

It seems to me we need to separate the issues in order to clarify them.

The ACLU has been a pain in the ass to people of faith, not to mention people of conscience, for decades. It's high time somebody came up with a strategy to combat the legal juggernaut.

Kenny Nguyen, the owner of the Wilmington, California, Valero station, lost over $21,000 when a computer glitch caused the price of his premium gas to sell at $1.10/gallon, over $3.00 less than the current price. Area customers managed to pump 7,000 gallons into their cars in the 4 hours before Nguyen noticed the error.

That seems to be the motivation for many mergers of what the Church calls "ecclesial communities.1 " One of the more interesting mergers from an historical point of view is the union, in 1961, of the American Unitarian Association (which consisted of ecclesial communities united in the belief that God is not trinitarian, except for more conservative sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses) and the Universalist Church of America (which consisted of ecclesial communities united in the belief that everyone will eventually go to heaven) to form the ecclesial community of Unitarian Universalism.

Washington State's Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell finds that it is not so easy to pin down the dapper, and perhaps a tad disingenuous, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Here's an example:

In writing about the coming exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and their inevitable replacement by IPv6, the Wall Street Journal declared (see "Web Running Out of Addresses"),

That addressing system is called IP version four, or IPv4, which allows for about 4.3 billion possible addresses. In the 1970s, that number of IP addresses was more than enough as the Internet only connected a small number of government and university researchers.

When the government bureaucracy divvies up the protection of a major species, like the salmon that keeps bears and fishing companies fat through the winter, and when even the President can joke about the complexity, not to mention duplication, lack of clarity in ultimate responsibility, and waste, who ya gonna call? Well Bill Arthur of the Sierra Club has an answer. (See "Is Obama Swimming Upstream With Campaign Against Salmon Bureaucracy?")

The L.A. Times reports "Cal State Northridge professor charged with allegedly urinating on colleague's office door." He must be a Tea Party member. All that tea goes right through you, so they say. Besides, if he were a liberal the event wouldn't have been reported by the L.A. Times. On second thought, if he were a Tea Party member, that fact would have been highlighted in the coverage.