Why do a lot of the posters here assume that if the gheys get the marriage, it will lead to the death of marriage for the straights? Would you all not have gotten married (for those of you who are married) just because Steve and Robert over there were the next in line? “Look! Homos getting married! That’s it, I’m out!”

And another point is this whole “married and children” thing going on. Do hetero married people have children? Sure a whole bunch of them do. Do some hetero married people not have children? Yep again! So what are we to do with those societal ingrates?! Imagine those two living in matrimonial bliss without progeny! Let’s run them out of town!

That is where we get to the government in marriage thing. The government should get out of the marriage business and just make sure that all people who enter into a contractual arrangement are treated equally. “All men are created equal” and all, right? If the churches and mosques want to add to that, fine, but they don’t get to add children or animals or whatever (which they could do now, if they really wanted, who’s to stop them if they don’t tell anyone?) because that argument is just stupid. No one who can’t give consent (cause they can’t talk or are too young) can’t get married or get paper from the government. Grow up.

And “no divorce”??! Shaaa, right. Again, this is the 21st century, not the 15th. Why should people be forced to stay together if they don’t want to? Are you people serious?

For the purposes of continuing the culture and the civilization into the future, man-woman marriage, with children, without divorce, is the optimal. Property division and inheritance are one of the crucial inter-generational issues that marriage helps solve.

There are many solvent, married couples wanting to adopt healthy babies. Any such adopted babies can grow up in the illusion that the (possibly unknown adopted) parents who are responsible for them are also their bio-parents.
Children adopted by gays can not.
Children adopted by singles can not.
It is better for children to be adopted than to be orphaned in even the best institutions.

I am strongly against polygamy and gay couples adopting children. I agree that two lovers who care for each other should have a way of their care preferences taking precedence over some default parental or ward of the court.

Republicans should support a “civil union contract”. This would be a package of civil contracts which explicitly specify the rights and duties of the union-mate, and be a written notice of what those legal norms for marriage actually are. Most married folk don’t really know, and it’s not even easy to find out.

Let me be upfront: I am a hawk/conservative, and I believe that gays should be permitted to marry each other.

This is because we attach a whole raft of legal assumptions and priviledges to marriage, which would otherwise be unfairly denied them. That’s wrong.

The only other rational solutions would be to strip the legal functions from a marriage- and that’s wrong. Humans are Humans, not machines, we cannot take something deeply rooted within us- mating- and seperate out the social element from the legal element. Would we want to? Imagine a world where marriage has no legal significance whatsoever. How would married couples deal with the issue of communal property? Make them cooperative shareholders? This issue wracks couples divorcing, do we want to burden every pair of newlyweds with tracking what belongs to who, for their whole lives? (Or at least as long as the marriage lasts.) And, what is the basis for granting parents any responsibility or authority for children? If we seperate marriage from the mating instinct, what happens when a corporation legally creates a group marriage for its shareholders and starts adopting children?

The “Human design spec” seems to accept that the optimal standard functional socio-economic-reproductive unit is the mated pair. Like with Ducks or Penguins. There is nothing wrong with laws written supporting it, as long as no one gets shafted by it, being denied rights otherwise granted to others.

You’ve made a wonderful point about getting the government out of the business of sanctioning marriages. However, I think the idea that civil unions should be limited to “couples” is an inappropriate vestige of the heterosexual marriage paradigm. If it is acceptable for two men to join together in marriage or civil union – something on which we both agree – why is it unacceptable for three men to join together in marriage or civil union? What you propose is a half-measure and on issues of personal liberty, half-measures are not okay.

Yours truly,

Neobuzz

Just because gays desire to be married, and to have and raise children, makes it neither a right nor a proper social policy.

Reinventing the fundamentals of society is how the ’60s movement has caused so much damage that we see today. This is just one more reinvention, of a social norm that (in spite of what gay marriage proponents say) is thousands of years old, and is a norm across almost all of human society (although polygamy is common in a few backwards societies like Saudi Arabia).

The arguments for gay marriage apply equally well to polygamy and polyandry. Are you for those also?

As for civil vs church marriages, these are already effectively separate. The state does not require or care about the religious status of a marriage.

Churches don’t care about the civil status of marriage (except where the lack of which it might get them in trouble or otherwise signify problems).

I, for one, am really tired of the social experiments that have been screwing up our society for decades.

Like you, I was a believer in changing everything – back in the ’60s. No longer – I’ve seen the consequences and come to respect the wisdom of the ages.