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Notes -
Well, that's the point that social conservatives want to resist, no?
(I am deliberately making no further comment on the OP and definitely no comment on ICE or immigration. I am mainly just refreshed to have a good old-fashioned debate about marriage and sexuality, as if it were the early 2010s again.)
Obviously the point of using wife/wife or husband/husband language by default, and of getting everybody to use the word 'marriage' to include registered same-sex couples by default, is to cement the idea that these are the same as traditional marriage. The endgame of the movement for same-sex marriage was the idea that same-sex couples are, as much as is possible, literally the same as opposite-sex couples, and therefore should be treated the same way - in law, yes, but also in language and in social recognition. I can't begrudge a progressive for holding that position, but at the same time, I don't think you can begrudge a social conservative taking the opposite position.
A social conservative, given their position on marriage, has an entirely understandable desire to clearly disambiguate same-sex relationships (even vowed, legally-recognised same-sex relationships) from marriage. The government can say "we call these same-sex partnerships marriage", but the social conservative position is that the government is simply wrong. The government can pass a law calling a deer a horse, but that doesn't make it so; marriage is no different. The conservative would then feel a moral obligation to stick to using language that they understand to be truthful. It's no different to somebody here stubbornly referring to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as 'he', no matter what Jenner's official papers say.
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