The campaign to prevent marriage from being extended to same-sex couples has led to a strange contortion.

Federal Conservative Leader Peter MacKay, borrowing a plank from the recent Tory leadership platform of MP Scott Brison, says the federal and provincial governments should get out of the marriage business altogether. The federal government, which has the constitutional power to define marriage, should eliminate the existing definition (between a man and a woman) and not introduce a new one (between two people). The civil union of two loving partners, currently called marriage, would officially be renamed a "union" or a "registered domestic partnership." Born romantics, these Tories.

The idea, which has also been bruited in a Justice Department discussion paper, is that only houses of worship could perform a ceremony known as marriage. The state would still issue the legal certificate, and presumably there would be no law against "registered domestic partners" referring to themselves as married, but the state would not refer to them as "married" and would not consider them legally "married." Whether divorce would retain that name as the instrument of dissolving "partnerships" is anyone's guess. So is whether the rules would remain under federal jurisdiction if Ottawa no longer used the term "marriage," the precise word the Constitution uses in allocating federal and provincial powers.

In their zeal, Mr. MacKay and others seized with the no-name option may have failed to notice the new indignity they would be creating. The notion of marriage is broader than church weddings. Atheists get married. Men and women of different faiths marry each other, and have a civil ceremony out of choice or necessity. Couples who want to get married in their church are often forced to turn elsewhere, as in the case of divorced Catholics.

The churches have the authority not to marry couples they don't want to marry. That right of religious freedom is protected in the constitutional Charter of Rights and Freedoms. What the existing federal law necessarily ensures -- also with constitutional authority -- is that marriage is available to all heterosexual couples who are prepared to accept the legal obligations that flow from it. Mr. MacKay and those who think like him would toss all that out solely to reject an amendment -- the inclusion of gays in the marriage tent -- that would affect their lives not one whit, and would have no effect at all on whom churches could and could not decide to marry.

As options go, this one is bankrupt.