Well it took another commission in yet another state to make clear that civil unions are not marriages and thus do not give all the rights, benefits, and privileges of marriage. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer which obtained an early copy of the findings of the NJ Civil Union Review Commission, civil unions in the Garden State have been a failure.
Steven Goldstein who chairs Garden State Equality and who also co-chairs the Civil Union Review Commission had harsh words for the civil unions law saying that it “segegates, discriminates and humiliates the very people it is supposed to protect.”
Members of the New Jersey LGBT community have voted with their feet. As of mid-January only 2, 329 couples have walked into their municipal offices and applied for a civil union license. Despite the posturing of what’s left of the Democratic presidential candidates that civil unions are “as good as” marriages, folks in NJ just do not believe it.
Commission hearings took testimony from 96 people, among them Lynn Fontaine Newsome, president of the NJ State Bar Association, who called NJ civil unions “a failed experiment.”
The findings cite Massachusetts as the only state that has provided LGBT relationship equality. Everyone knows what marriage is. Folks in VT, CT, NJ, and now NH are still trying to figure out what civil unions are. While that is happening, LGBT people are being discriminated against–even though they are in civil unions that are meant to protect them. Or perhaps the civil unions are just meant to give LGBT people a crumb and placate marriage equality opponents.
Massachusetts, with 10,000 same-sex couples married, offers a legitimate object lesson to those who want to study relationship equality in a fair and open-minded way
Courting Equality 
It is not quit clear to me why so many right-wing conservatives are completely against gay marriage. They are essentially trying to convince people that mutually respectful relationships are not beneficial to the couple or the society around them. In addition, Democrats that favor civil unions over marriage rights are opening the door to straight couples entering into civil unions so that they can get the benefits alloted, without actually getting married. Civil unions, then , will actually lower the overall marriage rate. Who is to stop two straight “friends” from filing for a civil union in order to get work-related benefits in a state. Legalizing gay marriage would raise the overall marriage rates and civil unions would lower it. This is perhaps the goal of both political parties. Civil unions means no access to Social Security, whereas marriage does give access.
I’m a legally married gay man in Massachusetts, and because there is no federal recognition of our marriage, we will not contribute the bankruptcy of Social Security because we will not have access to the money that we pay for legally married straight couples tat into the Social Security Benefits of his/her spouse. Civil Unions may have nothing to do with gay rights, but rather may be a way of keeping money available in Social Security.
Jos76
http://www.jos76.wordpress.com