My whole point is that court decisions aimed at providing "protection" for certain groups of people may sound benevolent on their face, but in fact they result in a more totalitarian government than you had before the decision was rendered.
That's exactly what happened with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In only a couple of decades, we went from a situation where the Federal government legislated "equal protection under the law" for all people, to one where the Federal government could send an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission representative to your place of business to issue a citation against you for failing to have enough people of certain "protected classes" working for you.
You've also missed a very important point regarding the Constitutional amendment issue. The purpose of a Constitutional amendment on the Federal level is not to "impose morality" on people -- it's to prevent the court or legislature in one state from using its own power to force its will on other sovereign states. By law, a marriage in one state is presumed to be legitimate in all other states. So a state like Alabama or Utah that has no interest in recognizing homosexual marriages could effectively be forced to do so just because one stae (Massachusetts) decided to recognize them.
This is why I use the hypothetical case of polygamists to make the point. There is absolutely no reason why a state court cannot recognize polygamy as a valid definition of "marriage" (in fact, as I've pointed out earlier, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts would have to rule its recent ruling on homosexual marriage invalid in order to reject a petition for recognition by a polygamist). And once that court does this, then your state will have to recognize the marriage as valid.
This may sound like nothing more than a libertarian "live and let live" issue, but your home state will be thrown into utter chaos the first time a public employee goes to another state to get "married" in this manner, then comes back and demands to have all of his "spouses" (three, four, or -- who knows -- maybe 4,000) covered by taxpayer-funded insurance and pension plans.
I understand what your are saying. And I fully agree that some of this equal protection affirmative action nonsense went way too far. I agree with you 100% in that respect. I don't like it either. But I think that sort of thing goes in spurts and it appears that we are shifting away from this rampant and oppressive political correctness.
It's true though that allowing gay marriage would result in gay couples gaining more rights and more protections under our laws. It will make it easier for them to file those insipid discrimination suits. I will concede that. But when the smoke all clears, things just wouldn't be that much different than they are now except it will be more fair and free here and the ever vocal gay rights movement will eventually run out of things to gripe about and most of them will just go home.
This is not my issue. Too me, the whole gay rights thing is more of an annoyance than anything else. I do not feel threatened by homosexuals, nor do I care if they marry. It's no skin off my back. I would just as soon concede to these people and let them have what they want. It's just my nature to live and let live. I don't care what anyone else does as long as they don't bother me or people I care about.
I can see that you will never agree with me on this. You probably believe that allowing gay marriage would just be a first step into much worse moral depravity in our society. I just don't believe that. I think that's misplaced alarmism. Like I've said elsewhere in these threads, if anything is going to prove to be our undoing, I would just as soon that it be freedom. I don't think government should be in the business of limiting what people do unless the conduct they are limiting causes significant unjustifiable harm to others or creates a substantial and unjustifiable risk thereof.