What is this fear of sameness of which you speak?

And then of course there's gay marriage, which by its very terms, seeks to change the accepted definition of marriage as primarily an institution for the creation of families -- and when I say "families," I mean "children" -- to an institution based purely on romantic love. Romantic love ought to be a part of any marriage, to be sure, but we haven't previously confused being "in love" with taking the solemn step of marrying another.

In arguing for gay marriage, its supporters are consciously and unavoidably seeking to change the very nature of the institution, from something quasi-sacred and chiefly about children and family to what is basically a government certificate of Goin' Steady.

So do you think marriage should be denied to couples who have no intention of having children, or are physically incapable? What about people who marry late in life, after the death of a spouse - when they are long past their fertile years?

I think government oughta just get out of the 'marrying' business altogether and only recognize 'civil unions'. Leave 'marriages' to the churches (although some churches will chose to perform marriages for gay couples).

I don't think that just because Brett and Steve in San Francisco want to register for gifts, wear matching tuxes, and have rice thrown at them, that I have to change my cultural and religious definition of the word marriage.

Monday Night Football is on Monday night, NASCAR races go counter-clockwise, and Marriage is between a man and a woman (PERIOD).

Well said, Ace. My sentiments exactly. However, many will consider what you said to be hate speech.

As far as I'm concerned, if they can find a pastor to sanction them and a church to embrace them, that's fine. However, for the exact reasons you mention above, that doesn't mean the state or the rest of us need to accept what they've done as Marriage.

I agree that the gay community has pushed too hard on this issue, and that this has resulted in something of a backlash (though how long-term it's likely to be is another matter).

However, I have to agree with Sully that the "gay marriage threatens traditional marriage" meme rings rather hollow. I have never felt that my marriage and family were threatened by gay people wanting to be married, or transsexuals wanting to be married in their "reassigned" sex, or whatever.

Heterosexuals have done more damage to the institution of marriage than gays. Just look at the recent spate of celebrity marriages that last little more than days, if that. If Britney Spears can get legally married just for sport, why not allow a gay couple who are seriously committed to get married?

I think that the lesson of all this is that perhaps the role of the state in marriage is a little too heavy. If marriage was treated more as a matter of contract right, then we really wouldn't be having this debate at all.

You're being suckered into an argument. The word homophobia, like racism, has a specific meaning, which is NOT 'anyone who disagrees with you'. 99% of the time when you see these words, they're in a context in which they mean nothing.

As a homo, I don't even listen when I hear this word, because I know that 9 times out of 10, it's being used to finesse a real argument. This is how identity politics sharpens political divisions & creates a vicious cycle: minorities demonize anyone who disagrees with them, creating a backlash that they then point to as proof of their paranoia! Perfect!

I'm going to side with Batman on this one.

Why is the government in the business of telling anyone who can marry whom? When I got married, my husband and I made our vows before God. I really don't need Big Daddy Government to step in and make it all legit.

Let anyone couple who wants to get a civil union, and leave the business of marrying people to the churches (who, I should add, should be perfectly free to refuse to marry any couple who doesn't comport with their beliefs, be it because of the couple's sexual orientation or their faith or whatever).

I go the other way on this.

As things stand, gay couples can adopt, can get custody of the children of one partner or the other from a previous relationship, and lesbians can have all the children they want by artificial insemination, but even gay couples with children can't get married.

The country should either (1) get gays out of the parenting business or (2) make marriage available to gay parents. I vote for option 2.

No J Mann, what we need to do is get the government out of the definition of marriage.

However, this has a side effect. If an insurance company decides not to cover a particular type of union (beit SSM, man & woman, man & dog, etc), you just have to deal with it. Once you take the government's responsibility away, you lose the benefits.

If you want the Government to continue with the enforcement of the definition, then the states need to vote on the issue. As this last election showed, it is NOT as widely accepted as people want you to believe.

(many of whom continue to believe that it is against God's wishes, and yet are perfectly willing to allow gays to make their own lives in a civil society).

I didn't think anyone had noticed. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one with exactly that viewpoint.

The Batman -

Ya beat me to it. The only sticking point for me on this issue is the notion that marriage=family=children. I'll agree to the first two, but not the third for the same reasons you pointed out. The majority of Americans consider childless hetero couples as families. Do a majority of Americans consider childless GAY couples as families? For the record... I do. But I don't think the majority of America is ready for that yet. We're getting closer to that day, but we're not there yet.

I say, let's settle for civil unions for gay couples... for now. Lay the groundwork for later inclusion into the concept of "family." In the end it will make the strong and valuable concept of "marriage" even stronger.

JMann, Gay marriage will in fact destroy "marriage," because marriage is by definition a union of one man and one woman. Redefining something to mean exactly what you want it to mean destroys the origninal "thing."

It's like the guys who want to be defined as "women" because they wear a dress (pre-snip, that is). They quite simply are not, and it eliminates any meaning of the word "woman" to say that a guy in a dress is a woman. Thus, gay "marriage" is just another front in the pomo battle to devalue all values. I personally think it's rather cynical for the Left to play on gays' emotions like this, and is rather hypocritical given the Left's emphasis on "sensitivity."

That said, gay marriage poses less harm marriage overall than to society itself. With Ace's indulgence, I'll post something that I put up elsewhere:

Why fight gay marrriage indeed?

The union of one man and one woman, as the sole self-sustaining procreative unit, is the basic building block of society. Religious people believe it ordained by God (which is enough reason for many), but leaving that aside, a society that fails to encourage (i.e. show exclusive favoritism—yes favoritism) to that basic unit is doomed.

Marriage and child rearing are hard. It's hard to keep marriages together, and having children in non-agrarian societies is far more a burden that a boon, economically. De-emphasizing the value and exclusivity of marriage---as has been done with quickie, no-fault divorces AND gay marriage---devalues the sacrifice individuals make in coming together as a procreative unit.

Will gay marriage result in men leaving their wives for a life of sausage-smoking? Not likely (unless you're an Episcopal priest who's sick of the wife & daughters). But it will, over time, make marriage less valued in society. When marriage is devalued, procreation suffers (as can be seen from the child-rearing difficulties in the age of divorces and in permissive Europe). When the procreative function is hampered, society itself is imperilled.

Yes, divorce and promiscuity are huge hits against marriage that are already in wide acceptance. But piling worse on top of bad doesn't make the situation any better.

And really, Athens as the "one of the most civilized societies . . . " Sure, it was advanced in culture, but at the time of Socrates it was also decadent and foppish, skittish and indecisive, and generally so torn by internal strife and apathy that it crumbled upon itself. So too Rome under the latter Caesars. While you may equate decadence with civilization, it is in fact the slow-motion destruction of all things civilized. Decadence invariably leads to the fall of societies, and the open flowering of homosexuality in a culture is one of the recurring hallmarks of decadence. That's not a value judgment on homosexuality, that's a historical truth.

The reason gay marriage is such a big deal is that it is quite reasonably can be seen as a harbinger of societal collapse.

My theory on why this is so is, briefly, that a vast majority of any population is not gay. (at least 95% in the current USA). Many, if not a majority of that 95% find homosexuality distasteful. In a society where gayness is celebrated on the part of a "civilized" elite, you thus have a large segment of the population (perhaps even a large majority) alienated from their own culture. This erodes the civic spirit and displaces the natural feelings of (non-jingoistic) patriotism and love of country that most folks bear for their homeland.

Remove that love of country and people will simply refuse to wage the millions of small battles against chaos that face any culture (from random adults scolding misbehaving children walking down the street [that used to happen a lot, it's virtually non-existent now] to people refusing to help the victim of violent crime when they witness it happening). People simply disconnect from society. Apathy is a culture's deadliest disease.

You ask why. The best answer is that civilization might very well actually depend on it.

Then again, maybe not. But who wants to take that chance if you can see it coming?

While I agree with hobgoblin's argument about why it would be bad to change the definition of marriage, I think that even OFFERING such an argument is caving in to the left's attempt to frame the question in their terms. It's like explaining, "Why I don't support a woman's right to choose."

The legacy media do this all the time when they refer to DOMA-type laws and ballot measures as "bans" on gay marriage. By framing it that way, they place the burden of justifying the status quo on the right: "Why do you want to ban gay marriage?"

That misses the point. The set of cultural institutions we inherit from our ancestors constitutes billions of man-years of wisdom accumulated by trial-and-error struggles with the complexities of living as a human being in the company of many other human beings. We should not fuck with our most ancient institution "just because." "Why not?" is not NEARLY a good enough argument for redefining marriage, but framing the debate as one between those who want to ban gay marriage and those who don't is just a debater's trick: answering the question forces us to accept that worthless argument implicitly.

The real question is: Why should we change the way we've always done things just to suit the whims of a tiny minority (those who want to get married) of a tiny minority (gay people)? What social good will it provide, and is there a way that we might obtain that social good without changing the definition of our oldest institution?

DLTV,

Tradition as valuable for its own sake---as the "democracy of the dead" as it were---just isn't going to convince those who hold no value on tradition. While I would agree with you that cultural institutions are not lightly tampered with as a general rule, there are those, such as our resident liberals, who must be informed of the "Why". If it is a reasonable point of view, I see no problem engaging on their ground. Naive as it may be, I would like to think I can bring them to some understanding of the intellectual argument against libertine anarchy.

Of course, if they don't understand it, I will just have to keep explaining it to them over and over until they are sufficiently "educated."

All I'm saying is that if you defend marriage as essential to encourage optimal child-rearing, as Ace and Hobgoblin do, then it's worth recognising that society no longer discourages gay couples from child rearing, and that a bunch are doing it.

Therefore, given that we have gay couples raising kids in increasing numbers, and given that we all agree that it's better to have kids raised by married couples than unmarried couples, I think we should either be (1) discouraging gay couples from raising kids or (2) allowing gay couples to get married. (Again, I vote for #2, but your mileage may vary).

I agree with all the rest - it should be an issue for the voters, not the courts, and it's incumbent on the proponents to sell the voters.

J Mann,

No we don't "all agree that it's better to have kids raised by married couples than unmarried couples." We (meaning I) would agree that children are optimally raised in married, opposite sex relationships, specifically that of their biological parents. The marriage of two people (gay, straight, related, unrelated) has little if any benefit in and of itself on children in those "families."

The raising of children by gays---legally attached or not---is a pragmatic reality, and in honesty better than continuous foster care. However, the perfect is not the enemy of the good, and marriage doesn't logically flow from child raising, but instead from child creation. After all, the state doesn't issue best friend licenses, or child raising licenses.

The only alternative to presuming opposite sex couples as fertile would be invasive fertility tests and procreative requirements. This isn't Singapore or China. It's possible to have a general presumption that excludes some people, especially when not done for explicitly nefarious reasons (unlike miscegination statutes).

You're being very reasonable and civil, and I for one appreciate that. These debates get too contentious too often. But your logical tying of marriage to child rearing doesn't quite fit.

I work on the legal case in Oregon, so you can email me if you want to (real email attached, with obvious corrections needed for spambots).

right email this time (with corrections)

Thanks for your civil responses too, hobgoblin.

I agree that if you don't think that children would be better off being raised by married gay couples than by unmarried gay couples, then that prong of the utilitarian argument doesn't go anywhere.

Ace, the solution is so simple.

Make the government's certificate a certification of goin' steady, with half your stuff ridin' on the bet etcetera. Call it civil unions. EVERYBODY gets them, and they cannot be performed by religious leaders.

But what you're talking about, and don't want to redefine, is a spiritual commitment to something higher than that. I'm with you.

Marriage remains - but it becomes a completely religious ceremony, granted at the discretion of said religions and as such, utterly immune to state interference of any kind (including the state under the banner of equality dictating to religions who they must marry). It confers NO legal status, but it will be desirable for many reasons to many people.

The problem isn't gay marriage, dude, it's marriage period. Broken institution. My idea is designed to do 2 things:

1. Equalize property and spousal decision-making rights etc. for gays who wish to take on those joint responsibilities as couples. I advocate independence, not putting people under state control, autonomy, and commitment elsewhere in my politics, gotta do it here too.

2. Get religions off the hook of feeling forced to perform meaningless marriage ceremonies because it's too tangled up in the legal process etc. Hopefully, they can then begin focusing on making the marriage process (of which the ceremony is just an end point) a time of mutual thought, exploration, counselling, etc. that couples have to go through to get religious sanction. This might lead to fewer people doing stupid things that lead to divorce and heartbreak later. This would make religious marriage doubly useful.

Hey, it's a thought.