Ah, so the ability for a couple to produce biological offspring is a requirement for marriage, in your opinion?
By your logic, marriage between a man and a post-menopausal woman should be illegal. Such pairings would not contribute to the “creation of a nation” or “produce offspring” biologically.
I guess we’ll have to institute some sort of fertility test before handing out the marriage license, eh?
Want to start over and try again?
While many U.S. Supreme Court decisions recognize marriage as a fundamental right protected under the Due Process Clause, all of these cases understood the marriage right as involving a union of one woman and one man ( see e.g. Turner v Safley, 482 US 78 [1987]; Zablocki v Redhail, 434 US 374 [1978]; Griswold v Connecticut, 381 US 479 [1965]; Skinner v Oklahoma, 316 US 535 [1942]).
Plaintiffs' reliance on Loving v Virginia (388 US 1 [1967]) for the proposition that the U.S. Supreme Court has established a fundamental "right to marry the spouse of one's choice" outside the male/female construct is misplaced. In Loving, an interracial couple argued that Virginia's anti- miscegenation statute, which precluded "any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian" ( id. at 5 n 4), violated the Federal Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The statute made intermarriage in violation of its terms a felony carrying a potential jail sentence of one to five years. The Lovings -- a white woman and a black man -- had married in violation of the law and been convicted, prompting them to challenge the validity of the Virginia law. The Supreme Court struck the statute on both equal protection and due process grounds, but the focus of the analysis was on the Equal Protection Clause. Noting that "[t]he clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States," the Court applied strict scrutiny review to the racial classification, finding "no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification" ( id. at 10-11). It made clear "that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause" ( id. at 12). There is no question that the Court viewed this anti-miscegenation statute as an affront to the very purpose for the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment -- to combat invidious racial discrimination. In its brief due process analysis, the Supreme Court reiterated that marriage is a right "fundamental to our very existence and survival" ( id., citing Skinner, 316 US 535, 541) -- a clear reference to the link between marriage and procreation. It reasoned: "To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes . . . is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law" ( id.). Although the Court characterized the right to marry as a "choice," it did not articulate the broad "right to marry the spouse of one's choice" suggested by plaintiffs here. Rather, the Court observed that "[t]he Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations" ( id. [emphasis added]).[2] Needless to say, a statutory scheme that burdens a fundamental right by making conduct criminal based on the race of the individual who engages in it is inimical to the values embodied in the State and Federal Due Process Clauses. Far from recognizing a right to marry extending beyond the one woman and one man union,[3] it is evident from the Loving decision that the Supreme Court viewed marriage as fundamental precisely because of its relationship to human procreation.[4]
I addressed this issue in an earlier post, but I'll address it again here. Nature has provided us with two (count 'em, two) sexes. Each sex is about 50% of the population in any given nation. Those sexes are complementary to one another, meaning they're opposites. They produce genetic material (sperm & ova) which possess half of a full DNA complement. Combined, this material can produce a new DNA and thus a new human being. Even before we knew the exact nature of DNA, people had enough common sense to understand that the opposite sexes can mate, while two people of the same sex cannot.
Now, invariably in these debates, someone pops up and asserts that not every heterosexual pairing can produce offspring. That's true, but reproduction isn't the only purpose of the marital bond. Another purpose is to encourage a man to bond to a woman and to use his superior physical strength and aggressiveness to protect her. Women are the bearers of future members of the species. They civilize men, and men in turn protect women so that the species can carry on. Even if a particular marriage doesn't produce offspring, it's still symbolic to our young people of the nature of humanity and the responsibilities we have to society.
You're defining marriage to be something it is not, and cannot logically be, for no other reason than that you think it would be, like, totally cool, and like, fashionably tolerant, to do so. But two people of the same sex cannot form a marriage. To call it a marriage is to redefine the term to mean something antithetical to what it was intended to be.