Okay, admittedly, I was drinking during, but the first thing this morning, I found a transcript of last night’s debate and found the relevant paragraph, from the debate’s segment about gay marriage:

Here’s the first:

Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

And the second:

No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically the decision to be able to be able to be left to faiths and people who practice their faiths the determination what you call it.

I could be completely off base here, but it sounds to me that Obama/Biden are in favor of having the government not recognize marriage at all. The government would recognize the pairing of individuals as a coupling in terms of the legal protections offered, but would leave up to the country’s various faiths whether or not said couple was married. (I don’t quite know how this would work for non-believers).

In other words, if this came to be, it’s be both a huge victory for gay rights, and a huge victory for religious freedom in the country. No longer would the government tell churches that so-and-so and so-and-so weren’t “legally married”: wouldn’t it be grand? In addition, more conservative churches wouldn’t need to worry that the government might step in and say, “Hey, you gotta start marrying gay people.” I don’t think that’s actually ever been a possibility, but some on the far right seem to consider it such.

In short: more space between religion and government is good, and this (perhaps off the cuff and unintentional remark) is grand. Hooray freedom!