Charles,

Constructing defective marriages is not an argument for same sex marriage. It is an argument for good marriages.

Nuclear families are (or were until no-fault divorce) traditional. As you go into the past, with different conditions, extended and substitute families happened, which largely provided the same structure as a nuclear family.

So what?

By the way, for those who raise the divorce statistics, there are two problems:

1) the probabiliy of a first marriage ending in divorce is well below what the overall statistics project. A significant number of divorces are second or third divorces, which means the number of successful marriages are higher than one might think.

2) The divorce rate of marriage is irrelevant to the SSM debate.

Some said that I consider tradition sufficient in itself for preventing SSM. That someone needs to read more carefully.

Tradition is a powerful guide, and depending on the situation, a very strong guide. It is valuable because evolution, at the social level, selects those traditions. Societies with really screwed up traditions aren’t going to last as long – at least if they end up in competition. If you have a very good society, ignoring its traditions is foolish or arrogant. Taking traditions without any questions at all is not that good an idea.

There’s an old saying: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It’s another way of saying that fiddling with things that work is hazardous.