“Don’t you realize that if a marriage predicated on sodomy is legal, it cements in homosexuals a “protected class”?”
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Just not true.
Are heterosexual marriages predicated on the use and manipulation of penises and vaginas? (Heterosexuals also perform sodomy, by the way.) Would you consider homosexual marriage ok, if they were forbidden to have intercourse?
This is getting way out of control. We should not be basing policy on genitals and sexual positions. Everything about your argument is based on hyperbole and fear.
“Don’t you realize that if homosexuals are a “protected class,” it is ILLEGAL to do or say anything that might offend or exclude them — that is, anything that is less than celebratory of their sexual proclivities?”
I have studied protected classes in law school, and this is just not true. They are getting you riled up over nothing and that is exactly what they hope to do. Don’t let them!!!!
No; homosexual marriage should be legally established only if they are able to perform PIV intercourse. So gay marriage would have to be between a gay man and a gay woman. One might argue about mixed trannies, though I consider that a no-go since that would not involve an actual male and an actual female.
Marriage is inherently "about" lawful sexual union. That's what defines marriage and distinguishes it from any other kind of affiliation, partnership, or social unit.
What defines it is intercourse which is procreative in form, if not always in outcome. The infertile can marry; the impotent cannot. If from the beginning, and permanently, the male cannot penetrate and deposit sperm in the vagina of the female, the marriage is null because it lacks sexual (PIV) consummation.
Law cannot, enforceably, prevent sodomy in any kind of pairing, heterosexual or homosexual. The law should, however, refrain from valorizing sodomy as a legally recognized constituent element of marriage. Permitting couples to do whatever kind of herky-jerky they want to do in bed, is fine: I suppose it's inevitable, since it's outside of the scope of enforcement (unless the sexual practice provides evidence of wrong-doing: beatings that leave marks, forcible entry that damages internal organs, for instance.)
That is quite different from legally-recognizing deviant intercourse, as an integral or defining aspect of marriage.
Answer me this: why does the State have any public interest in marriage at all, any more than it has a public interest in any other form of friendship? What business is it for the State to license people who want to grind shoulders, give foot-rubs, or specialize in mutual back-massages? Or share some couple-y kind of intimate ping-pong, or gourmet cooking, or bonsai?
The State has no interest in regulating any personal association unless it has, at the very least, some relationship to procreative potential. If the kind of intercourse you do, is the kind of intercourse that can make babies: then, yes, there is a public interest, because of the potential of generating a small person whose interests are to be protected.
Absent that kind of intercourse, the State has no business whatsoever reaching its long arms into our lives and loves.
"Everything about your argument is based on hyperbole and fear."
Bollocks. Everything I listed is aggression against our liberties, and is already happening. I'm not a paranoid predicting these aggressions: I am an observer reporting them. "What's already happened" is not hyperbole, it is real: and fearing incursions into liberty is realism. I fear tyranny. I hate it. It is a righteous fear and hate.
As I said,
“Don’t you realize that if homosexuals are a “protected class,” it is ILLEGAL to do or say anything that might offend or exclude them — that is, anything that is less than celebratory of their sexual proclivities?”
You responded: "I have studied protected classes in law school, and this is just not true."
Wrong-o. LGBT are a protected class (LINK). Perhaps you didn't realize this. This is a terrible situation. It must not be extended and advanced. It must be rolled back.