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It was about more than taxes and hospital visits, the compromises around civil/domestic unions and partnerships would have given them that. They wanted marriage and nothing less, to force it into the mainstream. Whether or not breaking the last few shreds of bonds holding civil marriage together was worth it for society in the long run, it was a very successful tactic.
However, now there is no reason to treat "only two persons" as the sacred inviolable unchangeable number, so why not "these three or more people really, really love each other and only want to be able to file taxes and visit each other in the hospital?" when it comes to poly marriage down the line? We've generally increased the age at which it's legal to get married, but why not lower it (e.g. if we're going to bring the voting age down to 16, or if we think 14 year olds are mature enough to be having sex and using contraception) in future?
We've now reduced marriage to "the state must recognise we love each other until the time we don't and want to break up" and that's it.
So, domestic partnerships really aren't the same thing; they're not recognized by the Federal Government, so they don't give a lot of rights. I've had a domestic partnership as a straight couple, and it's not really anything like marriage. You do get some rights! But hardly 'equal'. You only get health insurance from your spouse if their company is nice and allows it, for instance. It's not required.
Theoretically Civil Unions should have actually been "marriage minus the religious aspect". However, that was never really the case in practice: Civil Unions were never recognized by the Federal Government either. This meant that (for example) you can't get a spouse visa with a Civil Union. And still can't file taxes jointly. And if you ended up hospitalized in a state that didn't honor your civil union, you were just as boned as if you didn't have one.
Theoretically if there had been federally recognized Civil Unions that actually had all of the same benefits as marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges would probably have gone very differently. If the anti-gay-marriage people really wanted to preserve marriage for straight couples only, they really ought to have pushed for this, but clearly they didn't.
I strongly suspect if proper, recognized-by-the-federal-government-and-all-states Civil Unions had existed in the 90s (to be clear: Civil Unions have never been recognized by the Federal Government or all states. Not then and not now), we wouldn't have gay marriage today.
As for the religious aspect, there's the simple matter of religious freedom. I am fully on board saying that churches that don't want to marry gay couples shouldn't have to. However, that goes both ways -- churches that do want to marry gay couples should have the right to do so.
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