An institution can be designed to accommodate a condition without requiring that everyone fit.

By analogy, just because a house can accommodate a family of 6 doesn’t mean that a childless couple can’t buy it and live in it.

Now it’s perfectly acceptable for you to argue for disconnecting marriage from accommodating the needs and rights of progeny, but it’s not okay for you to create an irrational requirement of universality to exclude the diary author or anyone else from defining marriage to include the contingency of pregnancy and children.

Most laws in fact cover a variety of contingencies that exclude certain classes of people without thereby being invalidated.

Real Simple. Perverting American values weakens the country. Go to Saudi Arabia and talk to them.Maybe they would find a way to deal with it. Next someone is gonna want to marry their pet poodle.

No matter how you package it homosexuality is a deviant choice. I wouldn’t bring this garbage here. Keep your private life private like most decent people do.

I hope your answer is no. If so, this shows society can legislate moral standards for what is deemed a marriage. You personally may not find anything wrong with homosexual marriage, but many others find the concept revolting.

The “who cares?” is emblematic of what gay marriage debate brings. The attitude that marriage is not an institution, a responsibility and a social structure, but a ‘right’, leads to the dangerous conclusion that marriage can be flippantly changed without any regard for the social structural degradation that it brings.

“Who cares?” vs “Marriage is sacred” IS the crux of the matter – whether you view marriage in terms of its BENEFITS to those married versus the view of marriage as an institution that serves a social purpose. Whether marriage exists for much longer will depend on stepping away from the red herring of “Why cant you let gay couples get equal chance at a few benefits?”

“Civil marriage is an institution offered to legally bind two people together, providing them with spousal benefits. Hospital visitation rights, inheritance, pension benefits, etc. Just because someone is gay, they can’t enjoy these benefits?”

This is of course a huge red herring. We do NOT allow a sister and brother to marry, but any legal arrangements that siblings can make can also be made by unrelated males and females of the same gender. they dont need marriage to get written into a will, visit in hospitals, or share property. Since when is marriage about PENSIONS? Or hospital visitation? Marriage has existed for thousands of years, well before those things existed.

“Further – It’s not about procreation.”
“If it were, wouldn’t you think there would be explicit benefits for procreating?”

No it’s not about procreation benefits IT’S ABOUT LIMITING PROCREATION to conditions that ensure the next generation are given the kind of legal protection needed. Specifically, its not about the benefits to the parents, but giving the children involved the legal benefits necessary so that they arent – in the old-fashioned term – bastards. There is a lot of cultural capital we have built up around marriage and families, an understanding and set of expectations on fathers and mothers, and privileges and social status around that roles (Hey Moms and Dads get a ‘day’!) In exchange for that, we expect otherwise promiscuous males to stay home or be castigated as philanderers, take care of the kids or be called deadbeats, etc. (And not to Libertarians with their nutty get govt out of marriage ideas – do you want govt to be out of the chasing after deadbeat dads business? If yes, then you are diminishing the rights of children and ironically creating more govt dependence. not smart!)

As such marriage is definitely not a ‘right’ for the males but a civilizing institution to tie males down and make them responsible for the product of their procreation – if you want to see the opposite of marriage, witness the broken homes, families and torn social fabric of the underclass, with horrificly high rates of unwed births, and the consequent diminished future life of those children. Or consider other cultures where the traditions of marriage and the nuclear family do not exist; they are case-studies in societal failure, as a book written on Marriage by George Gilder some decades ago documented.

Gay marriage justified by the benefit equality argument – “Oh why cant a gay couple have pension benefits” – a disregard of the institutional view and argument for marriage. If the insitutional view of marriage is ignored, disbelieved or disavowed, the very purpose of marriage is swept away, and the social fabric it underpins is threatened.

What preserves marriage as a viable institution is the view that marriage itself serves its role in how children are raised. It leads to an odd conclusion: There IS a purpose for gay marriage – if gays are raising children. Gays cannot even have children without adoption or the wonders of modern medicine, breaking the last links between biology and social institution in marriage.

What if we go that route? Gay marriage then becomes justified by the incorrect belief that any family unit is ‘just as good’ as any other family unit in rearing children. Because of the rabid egalitarianism in our culture, any warning about some family structures being ‘better’ and others ‘worse’ is considered elitist, discriminatory, even ‘bigotted’. The leftwing cultural warriors are working overtime to codify the Murphy Browns and “heather has two mommies” as normative for a reason. Once there, we inevitably fall down the slippery slope of denying the right of christian adoption agencies to limit who they are giving up for adoption. So to preserve ‘equality’ we put children at risk.

But it leads INEVITABLY to a more corrosive and radical conclusion: If it DOESNT MATTER what conditions or family a child is raised in, one man, two men, mom and Dad, etc., then MARRIAGE ITSELF DOESNT MATTER since it confers no special privilege to the child.

Once we are at the point where there is not any social distinction made to keep children in married families raised by their biological parents, then marriage as an institution is no longer what it was. It’s obsolete.

You can call whatever remains of that formerly sacred institution “CivilUnions” or a “ShackingUpContract” or anything else, as it means nothing more than getting govt bennies for having a Significant Other … at that point … WHO CARES?

Thus, the arguments, attitudes and assumptions used to justify gay marriage therefore will cause the eventual ABOLITION of marriage and the purpose for which it was designed.

…other than close relatives, as defined by law. The decisions do not touch on whether a married couple can be of the same sex. Now you may argue analogy as an argument to extend the franchise, but that’s not the same as saying that it’s already been decided in these decisions.

And I’m not clear personally on exactly what the “right” to marry would incorporate in any case – nor against whom that right is being claimed.

[nt]

Because the only data I have seen suggests the opposite – divorce rates so far have been lower among same-sex marriages than the general population (not that I would suggest any causal link for many reasons I think it would be too early to draw that kind of conclusion).

by the liberal crowd to further demean traditional marriage. I’ll be happy to provide links that show this is the case later, but for the moment, I’m off to an all day closing.

I can’t speak for those who defend traditional marriage, because I want to get married to the love of my life one day. The fight to be able to marry will make the institution ever more so special for me.