“You act as if a marriage is no more significant to our civilization than hiring a teenager to mow your lawn and giving him a written paper promising to pay him ‘x’ amount.”
If marriage is more sacred than contracting for your lawn to be mowed, it is so because families, religious institutions, and society in general venerate it as such. Not because the state does. The state treats marriage as marginally more serious than yardwork, but nowhere near as serious as we treat it ourselves.
“By disestablishing marriage, and replacing it with these so-called civil unions (what an idiocy the entire concept of a civil union is) which are ‘gender free’ and have nothing whatsoever to do with an organic tradition dating back millennia, you’re being nothing short of nihilistic.”
It is disheartening to see even people on FR falling for conventional state worship. Unless you believe in the state’s central role in our lives, you believe in nothing. Nothing! What a crock. Equalizing gay and straight marriage in the eyes of the law would not make us treat them as equal in our own lives. Traditional marriage will always be preferred by society, for the simple fact that it’s productive.
If the tradition is truly “organic,” which I assume means natural, why can’t it persist on its own, without a central authority consciously deciding to prop it up. That doesn’t sound natural to me. Sounds rather artificial.
A society is impacted, and thus its citizens are impacted, by the way its family structure exists. People are not just the Human Autonomy Units that libertarians perceive them to be. They are discrete individuals and they are shaped in part by the society in which they live. The desire to protect marriage, a multi-thousand year old social institution which has been a foundational part of our civilization, is not an act of state worship. The idea that it is is a typical libertarian schoolboy reaction. Yeah, some people want to do "x", so they should be able to do "x", even if it means tearing down a multi-thousand year old institution and replacing it with some artificially constructed "civil union" concept. When people reject this, as they have over and over whenever allowed to vote on it, they're defending natural human society against leftist/libertarian social engineers who either hate our culture (leftists) or are indifferent to it (libertarians).
Equalizing gay and straight marriage in the eyes of the law would not make us treat them as equal in our own lives.
Who's going to equalize them in the eyes of the law if not the state? Since you consider state sanctioned marriage laws that don't include same-sex pairings to be an example of government going beyond its bounds, it's rather bizarre that you didn't think of that. And if the state does equalize the two, how will this impact the public schools when they begin to teach children about marriage? Will not the state step in and dictate that the kiddies will have to be taught all about the same-sex pairings? What will happen if a Christian store owner decides to give a Valentine's Day discount to couples, and doesn't include same-sex couples because he finds them to be sinful. Will he not be hauled into court by the state and charged with discrimination?
I can see you've thought this through really well. (rolls eyes)