Why does Sullivan think that redefining marriage is about religion. It's typical of a closet leftist to think that some new government involvement in peoples' lives is a good idea. There are numerous secular arguments against allowing anyone and anything to marry.
- Marriage is a cultural concept that is naturally exclusive. We limit it to two people, for example.
- Marriage confers economic and status advantages to the couple in our culture. We do this to acknowledge the family unit and to offer our shared encouragement. Why should we have to extend that to couples who are by their very nature incapable of producing families?
- Our founding fathers believed that no man should be required to pay taxes to support something he found morally reprehensible. Many Americans agree that one man and one woman marrying is moral. No sizable majority agrees to any other union. Therefore, taxes paid to offset social security and exemptions paid to same sex couples would be without representation.
- Marriage states that an entire county honors and hallows a union between a man and a woman. A considerable majority would find this untenable were it to be changed to include non-traditional unions.
- Most proponents of same sex unions agree that more than two people marrying wouldn't be required to satisfy their demands. However, isn't this an exclusion, as I suggested above? But America has found polygamy unacceptable as a legal arrangement for family units since the days when Utah was struggling to join the union. the Republican National Platform Committee paired polygamy with slavery when it declared it the "duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." -- Linda Thatcher's Utah History - Struggle for Statehood.
Sullivan confuses liberty with support. A community is no more obligated to support a coupling of identically sexed individuals than it is to marry a trio, a quadrupling, or any other number.
Americans want men and women to marry. All Americans support that. Only a radical few want to redefine that. And why may we ask? For the collectivist benefits, for the blow to our shared sense of cultural morality (both in Christian terms and others), and our shared sense that children should be raised free from discussions of many of us find to be prurient and unsafe.
This is not to suggest that any Americans should hate people who follow Mr. Sullivan's preference. Neither is it to suggest that they are unacceptable citizens of our country. Their individual rights end where our shared value for the traditional family beings.
The most disturbing thing about Sullivan's and many other homosexual activist's attitudes on these matters is that they want to redefine our civil rights, which are soundly based on individuality as human beings and confer them to groupings of people. In this case, they demand it for pairings.
Does this impact religious Americans? Of course. Does it impact all Americans? Yes. And negatively. Suddenly we are asked to join in and bless behavior that we may find unwise, and do so in front of our children.
This is both taxation and legislation without representation. It is undemocratic, and it is the tyranny of the minority through government. What difference is there between this and communism?
Anyone who claims to be a conservative should understand this. Sullivan is a closet collectivist without a doubt. He's out of the closet now.