How does a piece of paper issued by some bureaucrat give the bearer respectibility? Why should it? Why do people think marriage is a human right, let alone a right at all? Marriage is not a right, as it requires two people and there is no such thing as a "group right".
The only reason the state's interested in if and to whom you are married is that they have classifications for doling out the spoils of the welfare state. If the government weren't in charge of redistributing wealth in a myriad of ways, they wouldn't give a damn if you were married, single, or claim to be married to a tree stump.
When this country was founded, marriage was something that you did at a church and recorded in a family Bible. States started requiring licenses in the mid 19th century to prevent the miscegenation that the Democrats of the time disliked.
This notion of marriage as a contract between two people and the state is a load of BS. It should be rejected. If I had ever gotten married, I never would have gotten a license from the state.
The homosexuals who want to marry have a few motivations that I can see. One is they want in on the welfare state benefits. The other is that they are subversives and want to destroy Western civilization. The other is that they really believe that marriage is a right and that they are being discriminated against, regardless of the facts marriage is not a right and that you can set up civil contracts that provide for inheritance, etc.
In the eighteenth century and in British common law earlier, marriage did have legal financial consequences - the wife's property became her husband's, and legitimate children inherited and illegitimate did not.
You could, of course, make various settlements and wills, within limits.