Marc, marriage as an institution was dead the moment we allowed divorce to be legal — the game theory calculation changed drastically and it no longer is paramount to ‘get along’ with your spouse – if the current one is ‘broken’ you can just discard and fish for a new one, better luck next time! Frankly, modern marriage is not real marriage since it’s been downgraded to be a more involved engagement that can be canceled like a bad purchase.
And that is the real problem we have, the nature of the commitment has changed fundamentally and was broken at the core, long before gays even we legalised.
So, I’m not understanding why promoting marriage (or the sorry construct that is called this nowadays) undermines the little that is left of the institution, if anything gays marrying saves the taxpayer lots of money, ensures they have someone to look after them in their old age and settles them down too. In other words, marriage(or however you want to call this particular commitment) helps everyone, straight or gay and society in general.
I don’t think it’s good for kids to grow up seeing people who never bond and who are not allowed to either officially — and that broken legal structure that passes for marriage nowadays is not a good example of real marriage either: in other words, an unmarried gay couple who have been devoted to each other for 20 years are a far better example for all of us than people who nip down to Vegas for yet another marriage every 2-3 years, a ‘married’ woman whose kids are all fatherless half-siblings is a disaster for us all.
True gays don’t bring up kids, but there are plenty of childfree marriages, and no-one thinks that those people are not really married.
I personally like to see people to marry and to stay with each other so they can evolve into the full human being they should be, regardless of their sexuality, because people who have bonded with a partner properly are much nicer to have around and they are the folks in this world who usually take the adult role in life and get things done.
