How is marriage a religious thing. Does that mean that atheists can't get married too? And why do you have a problem with it being labeled marriage when two gay guys/gals marry. Because its religious?!! Marriage was originally used to make ties between families, not because of religion. Granted they would probably be marrying someone of the same religion but that doesn't make it religious.
This is pretty paradoxically written. First, you start by off-handedly asserting that religion is not a basis of marriage and never was. In your bizarro world, then, governing bodies one day for no apparent reason decided they were going to start issuing licenses for something nobody was doing already, and granting legal and financial incentives to get people to do this totally new thing which they termed "marriage." On the face of it, this is pretty laughable.
Then you tangentially go on to ask the rhetorical question about whether atheists can or cannot get married. It's as if you haven't made up your mind--if marriage has no religious basis, then how did this question come to mind? Then you seemed flummoxed that the nice people in governmental (and certainly NOT religious) circles got the idea that marriage was an exclusively heterosexual affair when obviously it was never intended for such purposes. Marriage, after all, was devised by governments to grant hospital visitation rights and for legal remedies for property transfers and adoption proceedings (though, amazingly, marriage somehow came to exist before the advent of hospitals as we know them or even of widespread land ownership.)
Finally, you come to the conclusion that while marriage has historically been about promoting family unity and overwhelmingly occurs between men and women of the same religion, there's no reason to call it a religious custom. All those religions that hold marriage as a religious rite or religious sacrament obviously had it wrong all these years. I wonder why all those people celebrate them in religious buildings then, with religious ministers at them?
You seem to have never considered that marriage was
always a religious arrangement that modern governments began to co-opt since the people being governed were already organized in this fashion. The government added things to what a married couple could do under their laws that had very little to do or at least was not central to the original religious arrangement. It seems it is these late additions to the marriage game that have people all aflutter in the gay marriage debate. It seems these are the things most sought after by same sex proponents, since they don't seem to be knocking down the doors of the religious institutions to get married in religious buildings by religious ministers.
It is on this basis that many will find it objectionable to call these legal arrangements equivalent to what has been known as marriage for millenia. If you want legal rights, then get legal rights. Just don't waste your efforts trying to rewrite history, religious or otherwise.
(P.S. And don't pretend that government grants the right to love one another--if you truly think that, you apparently don't understand love very well.)
/off soapbox
