Sorry, guess I got a bit confused seeing all the Biblically oriented posts saying that it's for straight people only.
It is the foundation of civilization, the structure that moves the motion of humanity.
Well, I'll acknowledge that we all sprang from heterosexual relations (guess I'm leaving the in-vitro conception people out, but that's a pretty small number), if you'll acknowledge that we didn't all get here from a heterosexual relationship that absolutely involved marriage. I'm one of those people, and I'm just as here as anyone whose parents were married on at least the day of their birth, if not the day of their conception.
Do a geneological research of yourself
Sorry, as alluded to above, my research stops with a home for unwed mothers in Quebec City. But I'm still here.
Here's one thing I think you might be able to explain to me. When people on these threads talk about the destruction of marriage, that's the part that's the hardest for me to understand. I would suspect that those in the mushy middle have some problem with it, too. If the gay couple across town from you, or even the guy across the county in love with his unneutered dog, or the threesome in the next state all get some government-issued piece of paper saying they are "married", how does that invalidate or destroy what heterosexual marriages between only two people have? What would it actually take away from my wife and myself? Wouldn't we be just as able to think of ourselves as married, just as we would if none of the above had ever happened? Wouldn't society still honor our marriage, even if it extends that honor to relationships that we either don't engage in, or further, find quite distasteful?
The destruction occurs over generations as the laws and customs are pulled in new directions because of the redefinition. Marriage arose as an institution of civilization to strengthen families. The gay marrieds, as a class, will be able to litigate on equal protection grounds, to change aspects of the legal incidinces of marriage that don't appeal or apply to them. The family-strengthening aspects will wither away.
There is no more powerful legal instrument than equal protection. It can cut diamond.
The first principle of civilization is the control of impulse. Sharing things in common -- values -- is what keeps it functioning with peace and harmony. What nearly all persons who lived before us, and a vast majority of those who live now agree on is the fact that the nuclear family is the foundation of civilized society, precisely because of that heterosexual principle we talked about earlier.
As demonstrated by the Dutch, raising other relationships to equal status lowers the value of the essential one. What is happening there is a separation of childrearing and marriage. They view marriage as just an adult convenience; having kids is something else. The out of wedlock birthrate is something like 60%. Couples are often waiting until the second child to consider marriage. This actually increases government costs and is certainly not an idea structure for a nation.
I'm running out of time. Talk to you later.