You'll forgive me if I find expanding the definition of "marriage" in state and federal law to be a more reasonable approach than having to fight separate battles for each of the 1000+ legal rights and obligations which currently accrue to married couples.
In many countries, you have the concept of de-facto relationships - you don't even need to be married, let alone have a civil union, and you have the same rights.
So it's not like the courts couldn't do it - and in many cases have.
However, this entire debate is purely one of ideology and semantics.
It was never about "privileges" (whether tax, medical, or whatever), but about two different people trying to define what marriage meant.
For some groups, marriage has ties to family and raising children - and human society has sort of flowed along those lines for thousands of years.
Another groups says times are a changing, and we need to redefine marriage to also include homosexual relationships, which while nothing to do with families (as we know them) or creating children, are still marriages.
The definition of the traditional nuclear family unit, and the inherent roles and responsibilities as we currently know them is very much geared towards man-and-woman relationships.
You could argue that we should change these definitions - but until the, how the majority of people in most countries think of families is very much coloured by the concept of the nuclear family.
Then again, times are a changing - so maybe you'll argue that in the future, we'll do away with the concept of this procreation business, and just clone humans, or have surrogate artificial wombs and we'll just pick our kids off an assembly line fully grown =).
For starters:
* Members of a couple (same-sex or opposite sex) have family obligations to their partner's extended family.
* A surprising number of same-sex couples have biological children from earlier relationships.
* The "traditional nuclear family unit" is not that old a tradition - prior to large-scale industrialization and easy migration, extended families were the rule. It's just one kind of family. Others exist.
