I'm a "businesspeople" myself and I agree with your opening statement. I do like how you tried to bring the offshoring debate in the second part, even if I don't agree. Nice tactic - even if you're wrong (national security implications concern me, not business implications).
As to the question at hand, all this article needed to say is that Civil Rights are conferred by the status of citizenship (as opposed to the color of skin). Marriage is not a "civil right"- because Marriage is a religious (belief) construct to formalize an anthropological cultural truth.
Breeders have babies. Gays do not.
Marriage is:
1) a social tool used by females to force the male who impregnated them to help support junior. (The Big 3 needs of any civilization - safety, shelter, food)
2) provides a way of identification of the biological line of order, father to son, and mother to daughter) - hence a famly name.
3) enforces a monogamous rule on breeders. A female will be more likely to breed if she is confident that her baby will be supported, and that the man will not have babies with other women. the antecedent of marriage is thus "divorce" - where a man removes himself from the marrage, but still has responsibilities to his offspring.
Marriage is NOT:
1) an expression of love (this is incidental)
2) a way to get tax breaks (this is incidental)
3) why families have health benefits (incidental, but driven by a "housewife")
4) a method to get spousal survival benefits (incidental)
All this being said, the author is correct in that the gay marriage debate is about acceptance, as opposed to tolerance. Gays want social acceptance and "normalcy" in a world where they are clearly sexually abnormal, and incapable of reproducing independently of the opposite sex.
(to the Lesbians - you still need a turkey baster full of male sperm when you inseminate yourself)
In the end, science will provide an answer. If gayness can be linked to a genetic defect that increases the likelyhood of gay behavior, then we may be able to identify defective fetuses at an early stage of development. The gay gene can then be eliminated. (genetic therapy is preferred to abortion, though either method of control will have similar results)
Marriage is not only "reproductive." Older people, and those who *know* they can't have children marry all the time.
As far as eliminating gay genes, what you suggest regarding abortion is abhorrent. I hope you're being satirical & this is not your genuine position.
Regarding "gay genes," my view is that not only is homosexuality profoundly different from heterosexuality, male and female homosexuality are profoundly different from each other. In men, being gay probably *is* largely genetic. (I believe in women it is largely situational; another story.)
If gay men are largely shaped by their genes, there are some points to be kept in mind when people suggest "eliminating" genes from a population.
First off, homosexuality is probably the result of *many* genes, not just one. People probably get hit with a range, so someone with a lot of "gay genes" will probably have a strong predisposition to be gay; someone with less will probably be bisexual, and someone with fewer will probably be straight.
There's something else to keep in mind about gay genes. Genes persist in populations for a *reason* - they confer some reproductive advantage on those who have them.
Geneticists talk about something called "hybrid vigor" - those who have a mixture of genes normally thought of as "bad" with those "good" amazingly often have more children than those without the "bad" genes.
So-called "gay genes" probably *do* confer some benefits on the people that have a smattering of them. It's not a myth that gay men, for instance, seem to be gifted in the arts and language. What if by truly attempting to eliminate "gay genes" we also eliminated many of the genes that help with linguisitic & artistic creativity?