Amidst the War on Terror, exploding budget deficits, and, oh yes, professional athletes popping steroids, President Bush somehow managed to find time in last week’s State of the Union address to strike yet another national nerve: gay marriage.

Naturally, the issue is of epic proportions, a battle waged between hapless God-fearing ordinary folks and the nefarious “activist judges” acting completely outside the constraints of elected mandate or written law who would force their will upon the unsuspecting public.

Specifically, President Bush called for “a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization.” Absent from this was any recognition of America’s divorce rate, which hovers around 43 percent, or other recent high-profile events which serve to cheapen the institution as a whole, most notably Britney Spears’ recent 48-hour marriage foray.

Rather, the chief threat to the sanctity of marriage comes not from frivolous abuse of the institution or from a stratospheric divorce rate, but rather from outrageous people who love each other in an unnatural fashion and who demand the right to have their unions recognized and the activist judges who are accomplices to this end.

What is entirely ironic about the whole affair is that opponents of gay marriage advocate protecting the sanctity of the institution through one of the most secular weapons in their inventory — the state — when in fact such an institution has been the very cause of the decline in the sanctity of the institution to begin with.

In colonial times, many states had anti-miscegenation laws in place to prevent interracial marrying.

During the mid-1800s however, some states started to allow interracial marriage, but for a price: one had to obtain the state’s permission first via a marriage license.

Such began yet another slow invasion into American liberty that climaxed in 1929, at which time all states had adopted a Uniform Marriage and Marriage License Act, making a marriage license a uniform requirement for legal recognition of a marriage in all states.

What started out as a racist attempt to regulate individuals’ freedom to marry who they saw fit became the behemoth that swallowed any traditional definition of the institution to begin with.

Yet somehow, despite the effective secularization of what was once an entirely private religious institution, some conservatives still want to go so far as to drop the legal atomic bomb by enshrining the definition of marriage into the Constitution.

Ignoring the frivolity of such an amendment for a moment, such a law would thus forever hand over control of the institution of marriage to the state, undermining any sanctity that remained in the institution.

Indeed, once the Constitution can be used as a weapon to define just what marriage “is,” what ground is left for religious institutions to define it otherwise?

Further incorporating the secular state into a core religious sacrament will only serve to undermine the very institution which they sought to save.

Rather than entwining marriage and state, advocates of marriage should seek a quick divorce.

This, of course, leaves many troubling problems in its wake — after all, many legal and economic structures are built around society’s current definition of marriage. Yet all of these establishments are entirely separated from whatever religious sacrament two people should choose to participate in.

Indeed, the law already recognizes arrangements such as joint custody and property arrangements for individuals who are not married — all of these arrangements are simply contracts in which the gender and amorous status of the participants has no bearing.

Thus one need only establish a common legal package for individuals seeking to obtain such benefits outside of the religious ceremony — one which includes nothing about society’s recognition of what does and does not constitute a marriage changes, as the concept would be left entirely now to the churches, synagogues, temples and mosques where it belongs.

In the end, it is a solution that gives everyone what they want — it preserves the sanctity of the institution while truly giving equal regard to all individuals.