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My local paper says that same-sex marriage is already impossible because an earlier ammendment forbids county clerks from even issuing marriage licenses for same-sex unions. We don't even need this ammendment to prevent these unions.

You are, essentially, correct ... the Amendment is unnecessary to make Marriages and marriage-like Unions illegal for Gays. What this Amendment does is make marriage-alternative legal contracts between gays illegal, too. Oh, they'll be able to have whatever religious ceremonies they like, and call it "marriage" if they want (The US First Amendment protects that right), but they won't be able to demand that the State recognize their "covenant" with each other.

The ACTUAL purpose of the Amendment is to block gays from accessing most of the 1,138 legal rights enjoyed by married couples as well as by any two people of opposite genders who shack up with each other and present themselves in public as if they were married. Granted, 74 of those rights can be currently obtained by filing dozens of legal documents (a process costing thousands of dollars in legal fees), but even then the protections those legal agreements provide are not nearly as firm as the marriage rights that they are intended to mirror. This Amendment would wipe out many of those legal arrangements (except for the few specific ones listed in Section 2 of the Amendment ... and even, then, there's no guarantee that the way Section 2 is written will enable those to stand). This is the Amendment's real purpose.

The ACTUAL purpose of the Amendment is to block gays from accessing most of the 1,138 legal rights enjoyed by married couples as well as by any two people of opposite genders who shack up with each other and present themselves in public as if they were married. Granted, 74 of those rights can be currently obtained by filing dozens of legal documents (a process costing thousands of dollars in legal fees), but even then the protections those legal agreements provide are not nearly as firm as the marriage rights that they are intended to mirror. This Amendment would wipe out many of those legal arrangements (except for the few specific ones listed in Section 2 of the Amendment ... and even, then, there's no guarantee that the way Section 2 is written will enable those to stand). This is the Amendment's real purpose.

Your premise is severely flawed or your sarcasm tag is missing. The sexual activities that people choose to participate and partners they choose to engage in such activities with do not merit privilege or special status equal to that reserved for marriage alone -period...

As far as shacking up -I assume you refer to common law marriage in Texas -if such, there is a little more required than "shacking up" to 'get' the marital benefits you enumerate numerically...