So do I, I was asking somewhat incredulously. This whole "sky is falling" thing is nonsense. I'm one of the people who have not been given a valid reason to be against gay marriage. Of course, not being a member of a religion that tells people what to think might be a part of that.
I think that my personal favourite argument is the paranoid delusional claim that proponents of same-sex marriage don't actually want marital benefits for same-sex couples, but are really plotting and conspiring to destroy the civil institution of marriage altogether, as part of a grand plan to destroy Christianity. They honestly believe that same-sex couples who claim a desire for legal recognition of their relationship are actually lying about what they want and that they're really deliberately and knowingly trying to bring about an end to western civilization.
No, it isn't. They're going to win in a series of court decisions, the matter never having once been addressed by the People or their Legislatures in a way sufficient to bind the hands of social-liberal judges determined to give the gay cabal what it wants.
I'm one of the people who have not been given a valid reason to be against gay marriage. Of course, not being a member of a religion that tells people what to think might be a part of that.
Well, allow me.
First of all, your evident prejudice against religion is something of a handicap. You seem to see the strictures and the structures, but not the benefits. Let's discuss.
First, truth in advocacy: I'm unchurched myself, and ex-Catholic. I no longer foregather with the Catholics, having noticed after Vatican II that some of the criticisms in Gibbon's 15th and 16th chapters of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire seemed to be valid, and that some of the Church's statements about the immutability of its cathedral doctrines were not. Likewise, I noticed at some point that the Church of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) had, on the eve of their petition to be admitted as a State, had a timely revelation that they should put away polygyny, and another later on, when challenged, that they should put away racial segregation. How very convenient -- and delegitimizing. Nevertheless, I'm enough of a Straussian to recognize the value to society of many things taught people by both the Catholic and Mormon churches, and by many other churches as well. Besides general moral hygiene, the good manners and (pardon my nostalgia here) virtues inculcated by many Sunday- and temple-school teachers to children are not at all incidentally priceless to the continuation of civilization, and of the American experiment, which you have yourself generously pronounced Not Dead Yet.
Among the benefits of religious grounding of law and custom is the concept and outcome called "felicity". In the Jewish and Roman conception, strict adherence to religious procedure ("piety") led to good outcomes ("felicity"), a concept never more obvious than when it operated in the areas of hygiene, agriculture, and animal husbandry. The prohibition against pork, in a desert climate, is an example. Rules about how and when to plant are another, and about how to treat sick or injured animals yet another. These religious strictures, as shown by the Laws of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments, led directly to Law -- let the atheist show how, without religious sanction, Law would have prospered. (Hint: He can't; there are no examples of an atheist society that became civilized. That null set is what I'd call a clue.)
Therefore, traditional rules (chalakhah, caerimonia) of deportment both in private life and in ceremonial religious life -- and the extension of religious life to include the personal -- have contributed vitally to the sum of good outcomes that antiquity called felicitas and which we call Civilization.
In the realm of personal life, there are differences among the ancient civilizations we are heirs to, and in matters private and personal we are clearly Jews. It was Jewish temple priests, and later the Essenes, who generalized the practices that we call now common modesty: the privacy of the bath and toilet, for example, and (until recently) of the obstetrical delivery room. Our concepts and norms about these things are identifiably, objectively, and irrefutably Jewish, and easily contrasted (as one recent lecturer on the Essenes did) by consideration of the mass bathing and latrine arrangements of classical civilization, which left us at Ostia an almost-intact public latrine with something like 18 or 20 privy-holes. The only similar arrangement in Western civilization is the military latrine and the naval head --exigencies of war, and marked in their exception.
Therefore, pace the American Civil Liberties Union, American concepts of privacy and proper living arrangements and deportment are thoroughly Jewish, if seen through a Christian filter, and Americans have always corrected the occasional naive visitor who offends against these customs, like the recent immigrant from one of the Asian republics of the Former Soviet Union who thought it perfectly okay to keep his young, fussy granddaughter quiet on a public bus, as people had done at home, by stroking her private parts -- causing a huge stir and cry, and the shocked grandfather to be arrested by the police. He simply had no concept of how offensive people in the States found that behavior. This is the process of socialization, and if you listen to our materialist friends, socialization is perfectly okay except when principles they dislike are involved.
You can imagine the embarrassment, in the example just cited (culled from a news story), of the lesbian social worker who might have to explain to the offender just why it was that his conduct was wrong, bad, and punishable by law, whereas her own promiscuous and unnatural couplings ought not to be.
One of the Jewish concepts that is taught in Sunday and temple schools is the concept of personal and family purity. This includes aversion to homosexuality per se, as either a sin and an abomination, or as Maimonides said of lesbianism as he condemned it, "practices of Egypt", and rebellion.
Now, I should add at this point that I think it is a huge mistake for conservatives to allow the Left to insist without effective contradiction that only secular, or more precisely secularist, principia can form an adequate foundation for any argument about social values. It is a consequentialist argument, to be sure, to say that, given that stipulation, it's game over across the board; but in fact our interest in consequences is valid and prudent, and it is again a matter of playing to lose, to give up the further principle that consequentialist arguments cannot be considered in discussions of law and policy.
I generally short-circuit these arguments by resorting to processualism: the Constitution and the Laws are whatever the People want them to be, and if at the end of the day society chooses not to extend the protections of right and principle to certain behaviors, then given the right majorities, the People's will be done. The conservative battle cry is, "trust the people", and trusting their sense of right, however grounded, is preferable to allowing the ACLU to play mind games with us, and is likewise perfectly defensible in practice, even if the price of being allowed to do so is waging political war on a class of self-ordained Uebermenschen who are fond of imposing their own materialist prejudices from the bench.
I say this because I noticed, in the "debate" sponsored by the Pew Center between Andrew Sullivan and a well-intentioned and learned but utterly hopeless punching-bag of a conservative (which is why he was invited, I'm sure), that the conservative spent a lot of time hemming and hawing over Sullivan's attack and the liberal diktat that only washed-in-the-Lamb, certified secularist arguments can be adduced as reasons for society's doing anything, by operation of the Establishment Clause. By which, of course, we mean the Leftists' own construction of the Establishment Clause, which they have precisely construed so as to establish scientific materialism as the official public religion of the United States, to please themselves.
Rejecting this argument, therefore, I say that people, in the course of formulating policy, can formulate any policy they please, if the forms are observed, based on any values they please, just as did the Founders themselves, who almost certainly did not intend that materialism and libertinism and hostility to Christianity would become the common coin of political discourse, and the default value set to be appealed to in making law. Thus Christians and Jews and Mohammedans are free to make their concepts of moral hygiene concrete in law, and deny the petition of homosexuals to be treated as their own moral peers under the law, or accorded privileges commensurate with those accorded people marrying for the traditional purposes of society. And I don't propose, either, to be hobbled by demands for consistency with this or that liberal doctrine -- that's why I'm a conservative, and that, to quote Robert Graves, is why the gods gave humanity a sense of smell.